Abstract
Party identification is the enduring emotional attachment that a voter feels towards a particular political party that disposes him or her to vote for that party in elections. The concept is used in several ways in the analysis of voting behavior: as a deep-seated ‘cause’ of voters' electoral choices; as a perceptual filter that colors the way voters interpret political information; and as a means of estimating the size of each party's ‘core vote.’ Although party identification was originally thought to be primarily a psychological attribute deriving from an individual's early socialization experiences, more recent thinking has regarded it as a running tally of retrospective evaluations of party performance. There is continuing disagreement both about how party identification should be measured in different national contexts and how extensive it is in contemporary democratic countries. Traditional measures suggest that party identifications are common and widespread. More recent measures suggest that such identifications are both less common than they used to be and much less stable over time than the socialization approach would imply.
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