Partisanship, Independence, and No Preference: Another Look at the Measurement of Party Identification

Abstract

This study challenges the conclusion, by Miller and Wattenberg, that the decline of partisanship in the United States is due largely to the diminished saliency of our parties as instruments of democratic government. The Miller-Wattenberg argument is built on an analysis of discrepancies in the CPS measure of party identification. As the results below show, however, the traditional seven-point scale is more appropriatp than the alternative conceptualization offered by these authors for examining popular attitudes toward the parties, or toward political parties generally. Nopreference nonpartisans and self-professed Independents do indeed differ in some important respects -but their differences have less to do with the way they view the parties than with their orientation toward the symbols of partisan independence. Although the saliency hypothesis may account for the rise of no-preference nonpartisanship (relative to independence) since the late sixties, the process of party disaggregation itself cannot be so easily explained.