Macropartisanship with Independents

Abstract

Abstract MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson’s classic article “Macropartisanship” extended the study of political behavior from static analyses of American elections to the dynamics of partisanship between elections. This launched new frontiers of research, such as studying the effects of presidential approval and economic indices on aggregate party identification. However, the Macropartisanship literature made an important oversight: changes in partisanship between elections are usually from one partisan group to identification as an independent, or vice versa. A single measure of aggregate partisanship, like the original Macropartisanship measure, leaves out independents altogether. This has important theoretical and empirical consequences that are evident in an era of increasingly strong partisanship. We conceive of Macropartisanship as a compositional variable and study how its components are affected by changes in economic sentiment and presidential approval.