Expressive Partisanship in Comparative Perspective

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel brings together works that explore the nature, origins, and effects of expressive partisanship in comparative perspective.

“Partisanship” has been one of the most widely used explanatory variables in political science research during last decades. Questions measuring partisanship have consistently been a part of cross-national surveys in, at least, more than fifty countries. However, serious disagreements over the nature and universality of “partisanship” have continued throughout this time. A group of scholars defined the concept as referring to social identity, while another group of scholars argued that partisanship corresponded to a running tally of performance evaluations and issue preferences (Johnston, 2006). The first approach is called expressive partisanship, while the latter approach is named as instrumental partisanship. The second area of disagreement has been the issue of universality of partisanship. While many scholars expected that “partisanship”, as theorized in the American political context, could travel to other countries, others argued that the concept was not meaningful in European multi-party systems (Bartle & Bellucci, 2014). In sum, our understanding of one of the most frequently used concepts in political science has been limited for a long time.

There has been a sustained effort during the last few years to solve these puzzles through theoretical development, fine-grained survey questions, and experimental methods. For example, Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe (2015) have demonstrated that in the United States, a multi-item partisan identity scale measuring expressive partisanship better predicts campaign activity than having a strong stance on subjectively important policy issues, the strength of ideological self-placement, or a measure of ideological identity. Bankert, Huddy and Rosema (2017) developed a new partisan identity scale that could be used in multi-party systems to capture the expressive dimension of partisanship. Using this scale and various experimental designs, Huddy, Bankert and Davies (2018) have demonstrated that strong partisans in Europe exhibit characteristics of expressive partisans, such as stable partisan identity, motivated reasoning in defense of the party, and the greater influence of identity than issues and ideology in shaping vote choice and political behavior. Finally, various works have reaffirmed the role of negative partisan identification, as different from positive partisan identification, in determining political behavior (Medeiros & Noël, 2014; McGregor, Caruana & Stephenson 2015).

Our panel aims to create a dialogue between scholars exploring expressive partisanship in a comparative framework. In the first paper of this panel, Davies and Huddy focus on the measurement of partisanship. They evaluate the measurement of partisan identity direction and strength drawing on data from several large-scale national surveys that have included the partisan identity scale (US, UK, Sweden, and the Netherlands). In the second paper, Bankert introduces a new scale that measures negative partisanship and examines how this scale fares in the context of Sweden. She finds that effects of negative partisanship surpass the impact of strong party attachments, demonstrating that negative partisanship can exist independently of strong party attachments. In the third paper, Laebens and Ozturk explore whether expressive partisanship is meaningful in the context of a political regime in transition from democracy to dictatorship, i.e., Turkey. Using the partisan identity scale, they demonstrate that the proportion of strong partisans in Turkey is higher than all other countries in which this scale is used. In addition to this, they test whether patronage and clientelism have any effect on building partisan identities, and they conclude that patronage mobilizes voters, but does not systematically correlate with partisan identity. Finally, Duell and Slapin take a deeper look into how expressive motives can work in determining voters’ decisions in intra-party politics. They find that voters express a preference for rebellious MPs and show that voting for a rebel is an expressive act not driven by considerations of norms to vote with the party or whether the rebel activity runs counter to the preferences of the broader public or the MP's constituency. Importantly, they separate voters' expressive motivation to support a rebel from other expressions of identity such as those related to partisanship.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 37: Public Opinion

Individual Presentations

• Measuring the Direction and Strength of Partisanship - Leonie Huddy, SUNY, Stony Brook; Caitlin Davies, Stony Brook University

• Negative Partisan identity in Multi-Party Systems - Alexa Bankert, University of Georgia

• Expressive Partisanship Beyond Advanced Democracies: The Case of Turkey - Aykut Ozturk, Syracuse University; Melis Gulboy Laebens, Yale University

• Who Likes Rebels? The Electoral Success of Parliamentary Mavericks - Jonathan B. Slapin, University of Zurich; Dominik Duell, University of Essex

Chair

• Joshua A. Tucker New York University

Discussant

• André Blais University of Montreal