Partisanship Change in a Candidate-Centered Era

Abstract

The traditional view of partisanship as largely fixed and unaffected by contemporaneous events has been replaced by one which sees it as changeable, particularly responsive to ideological and issue appeals. At the same time, Wattenberg (1994) and others have found politics to have become much more candidate centered. This piece combines these two sets of findings, the lability of partisanship and the role of candidates, to show that attitudes toward presidential candidates (both winning and losing) have a short and long-term effect on individual-level party identification. Using the Jennings-Niemi seventeen-year panel of students, evaluations of both McGovern and Nixon, assessed in 1973, have a significant effect on 1982 partisanship, controlling for the student's 1965 partisanship. Even controls for attitudes toward more recent candidates and attitudes toward issues (assessed in both 1973 and 1982) fail to remove the significant candidate effects for either 1972 presidential nominee.