Party Attachments Research Articles

The Party Isn't Over: Incentives for Activism in the 1980 Presidential Nominating Campaign

Based on evidence from a survey of 17,628 delegates attending twenty-two state party conventions in connection with the 1980 presidential nominating campaign, this article argues that the fears expressed by Kirkpatrick and other scholars concerning the dangers to the parties from the growing involvement of issue-oriented activists have been exaggerated. While our evidence does support the conclusions of earlier studies regarding the importance of purposive motivations among contemporary party activists, we also find strong party attachments among these activists. Candidate and issue orientation were not at odds with partisanship; indeed, they were positively related. Finally, we show that party loyalty played an important role in determining the outcome of the Democratic nominating campaign among these activists by dampening the influence of ideology on candidate preference.

Changing Patterns in American Voting Behavior, 1914-1980

This paper analyzes voting behavior for President, Senate, and House att the state level for the period 1914-80. The major finding of this study is that since World War II, there has been a pronounced trend toward 6'particularization in voting for federal offices. This trend consists of more than the erosion of party attachments atmong the electorate: it also includes the dissolution of other traditional electoral ties such as presidential coattails, the midterm congressional swing, and incumbency. As a result of this trend, the vote in federal elections is largely determined by factors which alre unique to the specific setting in which each election occurs and by the ability of candidates to convert these factors to their political advantage through mass media campaigns. Peter S. Tuckel is an Assistant Professor of Sociology alt Hunter College, The City University of New York. Felipe Tejera is a doctoral student in sociology at New York University. The auithors wish to thank D)r. Richard Matisel of the Department of Sociology. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New York University. for his invaluable aissistance in all phases of this project. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 47:230-246 ? 19S3 hy the Trustees of Columbi.a University Published by Elsevier Science Publishing Co.. Inc. CX)33-362X/M31)0047-23(1S2.50) This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:29:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms AMERICAN VOTING BEHAVIOR, 1914-1980 231 In this article, we use the term to describe this more general process in which each election becomes an isolated event determined by the unique set of circumstances surrounding it. Specifically, this article aims to document the increasing trend toward particularization in voting in federal elections from 1914 to the present. The discussion is in five sections: (1) the data base, (2) the decline in communality in voting for federal offices during the same election year, (3) the decline in the effect of incumbency on the outcomes of U.S. Senate races, (4) an examination of the impact of campaign expenditures on senatorial voting, and (5) a brief overview of the findings.

The Consistency of Inconsistency: Party Identification in Federal and Provincial Politics

La forte fréquence de dualités partisannes—identifications partisannes qui varient lors des élections fédérales et provinciales—est une des particularités du système politique canadien. L'auteur cherche à découvrir les sources de ces dualités ainsi qu'à évaluer la possibilité d'identification partisanne à un seul niveau. Des hypothèses soulevées par une analyse du degré de séparation des systèmes poiitiques fédéraux et provinciaux sont testées avec des données d'enquête concernant la Colombie Britannique.Lorsque la variable « force de l'attachement au parti au niveau pertinent » est controlée, on s'attendrait, au niveau théorique, qu'il n'y ait pas de différence entre les électeurs qui ont une double allégeance et les partisans cohérents en ce qui concerne la tendance à changer le choix entre élections, tant au niveau fédéral que provincial. Cette supposition se vérifie aussi bien pour la Colombie Britannique que pour le Canada dans son ensemble.

Conservative Socialism

The ideology of the British Labour Party is both forward looking-seeking to overthrow British capitalism—and backward looking-being firmly rooted in the myths and memories of workers about their past and their struggles for socialism. Indeed, the forward-looking aspect of the party's ideology is only explicable as a project born of oppression and its memory. Some elements within the Labour Party see the party's attachment to its past as an encumbrance in its fights with the Conservatives. Others would like to freeze Labour's ideas at about 1945. Both views are exaggerations. The battleground between them is over the party's commitment to nationalize the means of "production, distribution, and exchange." The modernizers wish to water down this commitment; the neanderthals wish to reduce the party's ideology to this sole commit ment. The strength of the commitment arises from its genesis in the workers' struggles. The party cannot drop such an important commitment because the creation of that commitment is an important part of the party's view of its past-and it is only this sense of a common past which binds the party and the labour movement. On the other hand, the commitment originally pointed to the future and the party will remain healthy only if it continues to do so.

Reciprocal Effects of Policy Preferences, Party Loyalties and the Vote

Past studies have offered diverse estimates of the role of policy preferences, party loyalties, candidate personalities and other factors in voting decisions. Most have postulated recursive (that is, one-way) causal relationships among the central variables.This study specifies a non-recursive simultaneous equation model and estimates its parameters for the 1972 and 1976 elections using CPS data. The estimates differ markedly from those of simple recursive models. Policy preferences appear to have much more influence on voting decisions, and party attachments much less, than was previously thought. Candidate evaluations strongly affect voters' perceptions of closeness to candidates on policy issues. Party identification may be influenced by short-term factors. Differences between 1972 and 1976 reflect the issue-oriented McGovern candidacy.Simultaneous equation models offer no cure-all; in the absence of accepted theory many specifications are open to controversy. But future research must take account of reciprocal causal paths.

The Dimensionality of Party Identification: Cross-National Perspectives

Rigorous description of reality is of crucial concern to the social sciences. Frequently the predictions of common sense or the conventional wisdom have proven unfounded when confronted with systematically collected and carefully analyzed data. As important as the establishment of facts is, however, real advances are only made when facts are fitted together in a framework or theory that both renders explicable their relation to one another and leads to the postulation of new hypotheses. The confirmation (or rejection) of these hypotheses then adds to the store of facts and thus to the refinement, modification, or even rejection of the theory leading to their generation. Progress lies in abstraction and generalization from raw facts. One abstraction that tremendously advanced the study of electoral behavior was the concept of identification. Long before the authors of The American Voter operationally defined this concept in the now classic way,1 it had been recognized that voters did not approach elections with completely open minds. Without the benefit of modem social science, Washington, Madison, Hume, and Calhoun all recognized the importance of the spirit of or party attachments in influencing electoral behavior. The advance for which Angus Campbell et al. deserve credit is the casting of this fact in a socialpsychological framework. Once identification was likened to other psychological predispositions, it could be fitted into a more comprehensive theory of electoral choice. Additionally, a variety of hypotheses concerning the acquisition of partisanship were suggested, many of which have been verified by subsequent investigation. Party identification has become a key concept in the study of mass political behavior in democratic countries. For all its operational specificity and theoretical centrality, however, the

Stability and Change in European Electorates

Arguing counter to the accepted positions of political sociology, we contend that voters' decisions are best explained by the absence or presence of strong loyalties to political parties rather than by social or economic factors. Hence, in areas where most people have strong party attachments, marked change in the partisan division of the vote occurs only when an exceptionally large number of new voters enters the electoral arena; alterations in the social composition of a party's voters follow changes in the occupation or social categories of those who consistently vote for the party. In presenting this argument, we analyze time-series data for Britain, West Germany, and Sweden which negate the predicted development of “catch-all” electorates, and we test the relative power of party and class variables as predictors of voting behavior in Butler's and Stokes's panel study of British voters between 1963 and 1970.

Contextual Models of Party Identification: A Critical Examination

A growing number of papers have appeared which report that the partisanship of the local context influences the party attachments of individual residents. The present paper criticizes this finding and the contextual approach to the study of partisan choice. First, the general mathematical model of contextual partisanship is derived from existing research. Next, a multiple data file, consisting of survey and aggregate evidence, is used to examine the generality of certain specific models. Finally, the same data file is employed to consider the effects of two assumptions common to contextual models, “random mixing” and nonselection. Only one of four specific models is initially found to fit observations. Further analysis reveals that individuals' party allegiances are spuriously attributed to contextual influences as a result of assuming random mixing and nonselection.

Party Identification and the Floating Vote: Some Dynamics

Several authors have now addressed themselves to the dynamics of party identification. The meaning of such dynamics has, however, been left in some doubt. In particular, it is unclear whether changes in party attachments are best described as completely random phenomena or as phenomena exhibiting patterned time variation. This paper argues that the answer to the question depends in part on the observable consequences of changes in partisan ties. The analysis utilizes SRC panel data to describe patterns of variation in party identification and to attempt to assess their consequences for our understanding of the floating vote.

Federal Republic of Germany: Superior Court of Hamburg Decision Denying Third Party Attachment of Copper Sold by the Chilean Copper Corporation

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France: Tribunal Decision on Chilean Copper Corporation's Plea of Sovereign Immunity in Third Party Attachment

France: Tribunal Decision on Chilean Copper Corporation's Plea of Sovereign Immunity in Third Party Attachment