Measuring Partisan Prototypes Using a Conjoint Experiment

• In Event: Social Groups, Social Identities, and Politics

Abstract

Given the increasing prominence of social-identity explanations for the role of partisanship in political behavior, understanding how people perceive the political parties as social groups is important. Social Identity theory suggests that people perceive social groups in terms of a group prototype, a “fuzzy set of attributes that capture those perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors that define the group and differentiate it from relevant other groups.” These prototypes define how we understand our own and the other party and prescribe normative behaviors and beliefs for our group as well as the behaviors and beliefs we expect from out-groups.

In this paper, we demonstrate a new method for measuring group prototypes using a conjoint experiment. This experiment presents subjects with a list of characteristics of a hypothetical voter and then asks them how typical this person is of members of one of the political parties. This method offers a flexible framework for eliciting citizens’ perceptions of partisan groups and allows for testing the role that a range of attributes, from demographic characteristics to issue positions to political actions, play in forming the partisan prototype. Drawing on social identity theory, we develop a series of tests to validate this measure and compare it to other related measures of individuals’ perceptions of the political parties.

Author

• C. Daniel Myers, University of Minnesota