Volatility in Party Support

• In Event: New Frameworks for the Study of Groups and Political Opinion

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze volatility in support for U.S. political parties among demographic and geographic groups. Traditionally, partisan identities have been thought of as “psychological bonds” that are formed early on in life and are relatively unchanged over time (Campbell et al. 1960; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002). In this view, an individual’s partisan identity stems from in-group and out-group associations with social groups (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Hetherington and Rudolph 2015; Green, Huber, and Washington 2010).

The traditional of view of party alignments as being relatively stable over long periods is to some degree contradicted by voting patterns over the past half century. Groups formerly identified with one party now support the other party. States that were not too long ago safely Democratic are now Republican and vice versa. These trends extend well beyond the well-known movement of the South to Republicans and racial minorities to Democrats. At the macro (or group) level, party support is fairly volatile.

At the same time, we see high levels of stability in individual-level partisanship and little party switching between elections. Split-ticket voting has declined, there are fewer swing voters, and only a few people switch between the parties. This apparent micro-macro discrepancy is analyzed using multilevel models to estimate the magnitude and sources of change in the U.S. party system. More specifically, we estimate growth curves for each group using ANES data from 1952-2020 and a large YouGov panel dataset from 2006-2020. In a stable party system, we would expect party identity to be almost perfectly stable over a thirty-year period. However, we see movement over a decade long timespan.

Authors

• Douglas Rivers, Stanford University

• Stephanie A. Nail, Stanford University