How Low Candidate Approval Affects Partisanship

• In Event: Understanding the Contours of Partisanship

Abstract

One consistent argument in political science research is that Presidential campaigns heighten people’s partisan identities. The highly competitive political context, this line of reasoning suggests, makes people’s partisanship more salient and leads people to definitively place themselves in one partisan camp or the other. In this manuscript, however, we begin with the idea that campaigns can heighten political identities, but these political identities may not always be partisan. We offer a new theoretic argument and suggest that a connection between campaigns and heightened partisanship is moderated by the popularity of the two Presidential candidates. In other words, a campaign is only likely to heighten partisan identification if a person likes their preferred party’s candidate. Using three novel datasets which consist of daily tracking polls (each daily poll N=500 to 1000) conducted by Gallup during the 2008, 2012 and 2016 general elections, we demonstrate a link between candidate approval and partisan identification. Over the course of all three campaigns the number of people calling themselves independent increases as candidate approval plummets. Making politics salient, our research suggest, will not always awaken partisan identities, but may actually weaken people’s expressed desire to call themselves partisans.

Authors

• Yanna Krupnikov, Stony Brook University

• Elizabeth Chase Connors, University of South Carolina

• Robert Bird

• Samara Klar, University of Arizona