Introduction to the Research Handbook on Political Partisanship

Abstract

In modern electoral democracies, political partisanship – broadly defined as the relationship between citizens and parties – is fundamental in any serious effort to understand societal and political change. The reason is obvious. Political parties are at the centre stage of the democratic process, as key actors in the delegation of power from citizens to representatives. In democratic societies, parties provide linkage between citizens’ wishes, governments’ decisions and policy outputs. The importance of reasonably stable, strong and long-lasting bonds between citizens and parties for mobilization and representation in democratic systems cannot be overstated. In the social sciences, concepts often outlive theories. Although subject to seven decades of fierce scrutiny and thorough revision, party identification remains the most influential concept in electoral research. Its genealogy is well known and its trajectory embodies general trends in social sciences in the 20th century. The short story is that Michiganbased scholars of elections introduced party identification in the early 1950s (Campbell et al., 1960), in part as a response to the Columbia school (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944), who applied sociological and consumer behaviour theories in their analyses of electoral behaviour. This way, social psychology was introduced into the analyses of electoral behaviour, with party identification as the centrepiece in explanatory models of party choice. Already in the early treatments, party identification was defined as the sense of personal attachment an individual feels toward a party (Belknap and Campbell, 1952; Campbell et al., 1954): an enduring affective orientation towards political parties, analogous to orientations that citizens can develop with social groups. However, all inventions have a pre-history. Inspiration for the concept of identification can be traced back at least a few more decades (see Wängnerud, 1993), to the Vienna group and to the realm of psychoanalysis, and the works of Sigmund Freud (1922) addressing psychological mechanisms within mass movements. Freud’s work was in turn heavily based on sociologist and psychologist Gustave Le Bons’s (see, e.g., Le Bons, 1897) 19th century work on the psychology of the crowd and the relationship between individuals and groups. In 1909, Graham Wallas (1909: 83) stressed the significance of emotional bonds between voters and political parties: ‘in the infinite stream of things . . . something is required simpler and more permanent, something which can be loved and trusted, and which can be recognized at successive elections as being the same thing that was loved and trusted before; and a party is such a thing’. Like many other innovations in electoral research, the theoretical thinking seems to have been closely intertwined with a dire need for methodological development. To solve a practical problem of lacking data on party membership, in the late 1930s American pollsters had to come up with survey instruments that could indirectly tap closeness to or engagement with specific political parties. The operational definition of a Republican