Political Choice in a Polarized America by Joshua N. Zingher

Author:Joshua N. Zingher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Interplay of Partisanship and Policy Orientations

There is a long line of literature dating back to Converse (1964) that asks the question, “What comes first, partisanship or policy attitudes?” For Converse, the answer is clear—partisanship is paramount. According to this line of thought, partisanship shapes policy attitudes (to the extent that people have them at all). Many subsequent scholars adopted this perspective. Partisanship comes first. Policy attitudes come second (Green, Palmquist, and Shickler 2002; Lewis-Beck et al. 2008; Johnston 2006; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017; Mason 2018; Barber and Pope 2019). If policy attitudes influence partisanship at all, it is only among the most sophisticated citizens and then only in specific contexts (Freeder et al. 2019; Kalmoe 2020).

It is easy to see what this perspective has going for it. In some ways, partisanship has to come first. People develop partisan attachments at a very young age. Many elementary school children identify with a political party long before they get a sense of the issues (Franklin 1984; Jennings and Markus 1984; Alford et al. 2005). Yet evidence suggests that individuals hold meaningful policy attitudes by the time they reach their early teenage years (Valentino and Sears 1998; Torney-Purta 2004; McDevitt 2018). If specific salient policies affect young people, policy attitudes are especially pronounced (Erikson and Stoker 2011). I argue that policy orientations are more stable than many observers believe. Policy orientations’ stability lies in their foundation in group-interests. Campbell et al. (also see Conover 1984) theorized that people come to see political parties as representing groups of which they are a part. Social group memberships (race, class, etc.) are highly stable (though see Margolis 2018 and Egan 2019). A long line of political science research demonstrates that partisanship is durable because it draws upon these foundational group memberships, in addition to genetics, preadult socialization, and other factors. I argue that like partisanship, policy orientations are rooted in these deep-seated causes, which imparts stability.

In this chapter, I address the reciprocal relationship between policy orientations and policy attitudes. Several prominent recent studies have examined the reciprocal relationship between partisanship and policy attitudes or core values. They vary in terms of measurement and approach, but to my knowledge, none adopt the same method I do here.

One of the foundational studies was done by Thomas Carsey and Geoffrey Layman and published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2006. This article, “Changing Sides or Changing Minds? Party Identification and Policy Preferences in the American Electorate,” used the 1992–1994–1996 ANES panel data and a cross-lagged structural equation model to assess the degree to which partisanship and single-item policy indicators (abortion, government services, and aid to blacks) influenced each other. They found people update their partisanship to match their issue positions when they knew the parties’ positions and viewed the issue as important. However, they updated their issue positions to match their partisanship when they were mindful of party differences but regarded it as unimportant. People who were not aware of party differences did not update at all.

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