Partisanship and Political Participation

Abstract

“Save America, Vote Independent” – bumper sticker One pundit who does not share the media's fascination with – and some might say glorification of – independents is New York Times columnist and noted curmudgeon Stanley Fish. In a 2008 column entitled “Against Independent Voters,” Fish produced a 1,131-word battle cry in support of the American political party. “What do independent voters do?” Fish asked, “Well, most of all, they talk about the virtue of being an independent voter.” Fish indicted the independent for providing a lot of sanctimonious talk with no meaningful action. Far from working to promote a better political outcome, according to Fish, independents merely obsess over the ways in which they are above the fray. “I can't stand the partisan atmosphere that has infected our politics,” Fish's fictitious independent laments. Fish's argument, facetious as it may be, does raise an important question: what do independents do? Political scientists have long suggested that, at the very least, independents cast votes, largely for the same party, election after election – that is, independents who vote Democratic usually do so consistently and independents who vote Republican can be counted on to continue to vote for Republicans. It is this pattern that leads many researchers to conclude that independents are largely politically inconsequential (see, for example, Keith et al. 1992). We suggest that this focus on the ballot box not only is narrow but also has limited our understanding of why people hide their partisan identities and what undercover partisans mean for American politics. In this chapter, we challenge existing evaluations of how undercover partisans participate in politics by shifting the question: What don't independents do? We already know that, for one, these people do not immediately tell researchers which party they support. More importantly, however, they may also be hesitant to share this information with their family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. This latter point is distinctly more consequential because politics is inherently social. Midway through the twentieth century, Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University highlighted a crucial factor in how individuals form preferences during a political campaign: “the two-step flow of communication” (Lazarsfeld et al. 1948), by which political information travels from elites to voters and then outward to their friends and family.