Value conflict and volatility in party identification

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 36, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 671-690

  Keele, Luke ^a   Wolak, Jennifer ^b  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33747890193     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123406000354     Document Type: Article

References (106)

1. R. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm, Hard Choices, Easy Answers: Values, Information, and American Public Opinion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002);
2. Stanley Feldman and John Zaller, 'The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State', American Journal of Political Science, 36 (1992), 268-307;
3. Howard Lavine, The Electoral Consequences of Ambivalence Toward Presidential Candidates', American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 915-29;
4. Michael F. Meffert, Michael Guge and Milton Lodge, 'Good, Bad, and Ambivalent: The Consequences of Multidimensional Political Attitudes', in Willem E. Saris and Paul Sniderman, eds, Studies in Public Opinion: Attitudes, Nonattitudes, Measurement Error, and Change (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 63-92;
5. Marco R. Steenbergen and Paul R. Brewer, 'The Not-So Ambivalent Public: Policy Attitudes in the Political Culture of Ambivalence', in Saris and Sniderman, eds, Studies in Public Opinion, pp. 93-132.
6. Robert Huckfeldt, Jeffrey Levine, William Morgan and John Sprague, 'Accessibility and the Political Utility of Partisan and Ideological Orientations', American Journal of Political Science, 43 (1999), 888-911;
7. Milton Lodge and Ruth Hamill, 'A Partisan Schema for Political Information Processing', American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 505-19;
8. Wendy M. Rahn, 'The Role of Partisan Stereotypes in Information Processing about Political Candidates', American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 472-96.
9. Paul R. Brewer, 'Value Words and Lizard Brains: Do Citizens Deliberate About Appeals to Their Core Values?' Political Psychology, 22 (2001), 45-64;
10. David Easton, The Political System (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953).
11. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960);
12. Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
13. Christopher Achen, 'Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response', American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 1218-31;
14. Philip E. Converse and Gregory B. Markus, 'Plus Ça Change: The New CPS Election Study Panel', American Political Science Review, 73 (1979), 32-49.
15. Richard A. Brody and Lawrence S. Rothenberg, 'The Instability of Partisanship: An Analysis of the 1980 Presidential Election', British Journal of Political Science, 18 (1988), 445-65;
16. Tom W. Rice and Tracey A. Hilton, 'Partisanship Over Time: A Comparison of United States Panel Data', Political Research Quarterly, 49 (1996), 191-201.
17. Paul R. Abramson and Charles W. Ostrom Jr, 'Macropartisanship: An Empirical Reassessment', American Political Science Review, 85 (1991), 181-92;
18. Robert S. Erikson, Michael B. MacKuen and James A. Stimson, 'What Moves Macropartisanship? A Response to Green, Palmquist, and Schickler', American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 901-12;
19. Donald Philip Green and Bradley Palmquist, 'Of Artifacts and Partisan Instability', American Journal of Political Science, 34 (1990), 872-901;
20. Donald Philip Green, Bradley Palmquist and Eric Schickler, 'Macropartisanship: A Replication and Critique', American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 883-99;
21. Donald Philip Green, Bradley Palmquist and Eric Shickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002);
22. Warren E. Miller, 'Party Identification, Realignment, and Party Voting: Back to the Basics', American Political Science Review, 85 (1991), 557-68.
23. Morris P. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981);
24. Charles H. Franklin and John E. Jackson, 'The Dynamics of Party Identification', American Political Science Review, 77 (1983), 957-73;
25. Susan E. Howell, 'Short-term Forces and Changing Partisanship', Political Behavior, 3 (1981), 163-80.
26. Dee Allsop and Herbert Weisberg, 'Measuring Change in Party Identification in an Election Campaign', American Journal of Political Science, 32 (1998), 996-1017;
27. Michael B. MacKuen, Robert S. Erikson and James A. Stimson, 'Macropartisanship', American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 1125-42.
28. Paul Goren, 'Core Principles and Policy Reasoning in Mass Publics: A Test of Two Theories', British Journal of Political Science, 31 (2001), 159-77.
29. Stanley Feldman, 'Structure and Consistency in Public Opinion: The Role of Core Beliefs and Values', American Journal of Political Science, 36 (1988), 268-307;
30. Stanley Feldman and Marco R. Steenbergen, 'The Humanitarian Foundation of Public Support for Social Welfare', American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 658-77;
31. Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided By Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996);
32. Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984);
33. Mark Peffley, Pia Knigge and Jon Hurwitz, 'A Multiple Values Model of Political Tolerance', Political Research Quarterly, 54 (2001), 379-406;
34. Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
35. William G. Jacoby, 'Core Values and Political Attitudes', in Barbara Norrander and Clyde Wilcox, eds, Understanding Public Opinion (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2001), pp. 177-202;
36. Milton Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values (New York: Free Press, 1973);
37. Shalom H. Schwartz, 'Value Priorities and Behavior: Applying the Theory of Integrated Value Systems', in James M. Olson, Clive Seligman and Mark P. Zanna, eds, The Psychology of Values: The Ontario Symposium (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), pp. 1-24.
38. Philip E. Converse, 'The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics', in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206-61.
39. Alvarez and Brehm, Hard Choices, Easy Answers;
40. Lavine, 'The Electoral Consequences of Ambivalence Toward Presidential Candidates';
41. Meffert, Guge and Lodge, 'Good, Bad, and Ambivalent'.
42. Ambivalence that results from competing values differs from other forms of ambivalence in that measures of core values do not reflect considerations recalled from memory. Given that our survey measures are value scales, we cannot conclusively show ambivalence. We can test whether value conflict increases the volatility of partisanship, in terms of the response variance and over-time variability of partisan preferences. See Lavine, 'The Electoral Consequences of Ambivalence Toward Presidential Candidates';
43. Howard Lavine, Cynthia J. Thomsen, Mark P. Zanna and Eugene Borgida, 'On the Primacy of Affect in the Determination of Attitudes and Behavior: The Moderating Influence of Affective-Cognitive Ambivalence', Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 34 (1998), 398-421;
44. Meffert, Guge and Lodge, 'Good, Bad, and Ambivalent'.
45. R. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm, 'American Ambivalence Towards Abortion Policy: Development of a Heteroskedastic Probit Model of Competing Values', American Journal of Political Science, 39 (1995), 1055-82;
46. R. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm, 'Are Americans Ambivalent Towards Racial Policies?' American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 345-74;
47. Alvarez and Brehm, Hard Choices, Easy Answers;
48. Steenbergen and Brewer, 'The Not-So Ambivalent Public'.
49. Dennis Chong, Rational Lives: Norms and Values in Politics and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
50. McClosky and Zaller, The American Ethos.
51. McClosky and Zaller, The American Ethos.
52. Donald J. Devine, The Political Culture of the United States (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1972);
53. Feldman, 'Structure and Consistency in Public Opinion';
54. Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Norton, 1979);
55. Robert Y. Shapiro and John M. Gilroy, 'The Polls: Regulation, Part 1', Public Opinion Quarterly, 48 (1984), 531-42.
56. Gregory B. Markus, 'American Individualism Reconsidered', in James H. Kuklinski, ed., Citizens and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 401-32.
57. Feldman and Steenbergen, 'The Humanitarian Foundation of Public Support for Social Welfare'.
58. Schwartz, 'Value Priorities and Behavior'.
59. Jennifer L. Hochschild, What's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
60. John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
61. See McClosky and Zaller, The American Ethos. Our theory assumes that citizens recognize the traditional values espoused by the parties. Clearly, if citizens did not associate limited government with Republicans and egalitarianism with Democrats, we could not expect much in the way of partisan value conflict. However, ANES data does not allow us to test this assumption explicitly.
62. Converse, 'The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics';
63. Norman R. Luttbeg and Michael M. Gant, 'The Failure of Liberal/Conservative Ideology as a Cognitive Structure', Public Opinion Quarterly, 49 (1985), 80-93.
64. Converse, 'The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics'.
65. Even though political rhetoric does not follow traditional value divisions absolutely, we argue that given arguments of issue ownership (John R. Petrocik, 'Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study', American Journal of Political Science, 40 (1996), 825-50;
66. John R. Petrocik, William L. Benoit and Glenn J. Hansen, 'Issue Ownership and Presidential Campaigning, 1952-2000', Political Science Quarterly, 118 (2003), 599-626), elite values have historical ties with ideological value arrangements that political elites cannot easily escape. In the case of issue ownership, even though a Democrat can discuss defence spending and a Republican can promote government investment in social welfare programmes, each is recognized as having strayed from traditional positions. Likewise in the case of core values, if a conservative employs humanitarian arguments, these claims will be viewed differently than if offered by a liberal opponent. We argue that when elites borrow value rhetoric from ideological opponents, they are recognized as having strayed from traditional positions. Indeed, even when elites cross ideological lines with their value rhetoric, they seldom disavow the values that have historically defined their party's platform.
67. John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995);
68. David W. Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Post-reform House (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
69. Some debate exists over the extent to which partisanship influences value priorities. Across many definitions, values are described as deep and pervasive principles that anchor other political beliefs (Feldman, 'Structure and Consistency in Public Opinion') and predict policy preferences
70. (Feldman, 'Structure and Consistency in Public Opinion';
71. Feldman and Steenbergen, 'The Humanitarian Foundation of Public Support for Social Welfare') and even partisanship
72. (Edward G. Carmines and Geoffrey C. Layman, 'Value Priorities, Partisanship, and Electoral Choice: The Neglected Case of the United States', Political Behavior, 19 (1997), 283-316).
73. Research also shows that while these core values are not invulnerable to change, remarkable stability in value priorities exists overtime (Ronald Inglehart, 'Aggregate Stability and Individual-Level Flux in Mass Belief Systems: The Level of Analysis Paradox', American Political Science Review, 79 (1985), 97-116;
74. Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values;
75. Milton Rokeach and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, 'Stability and Change in American Value Priorities', American Psychologist, 44 (1989), 775-84).
76. In contrast to this research, some have suggested that candidate preferences are able to shift core value priorities over campaign seasons (James A. McCann, 'Electoral Choices and Core Value Change: The 1992 Presidential Campaign', American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 564-83). While undoubtedly the appeals of candidates can influence how voters use values, this does not exclude the possibility of value structures shaping partisanship. As we find, about 30 per cent of our sample experiences some level of value conflict. This means that partisanship does not fully determine value priorities - if it did, we should expect little value conflict along partisan lines, with people changing their values to match one of the parties. So while reciprocal relations may exist among values and partisanship, our evidence supports the argument that the ways people organize and structure their values can influence partisan preferences.
77. As Miller and Shanks (The New American Voter) find, voters use value priorities to inform candidate evaluation and vote choice, in ways consistent with ideological value organizations.
78. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections'.
79. Franklin and Jackson, 'The Dynamics of Party Identification';
80. Howell, 'Short-term Forces and Changing Partisanship';
81. Abramson and Ostrom, 'Macropartisanship';
82. Green, Palmquist and Shickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds;
83. Miller, 'Party Identification, Realignment, and Party Voting'.
84. Some authors have argued that the NFS egalitarianism items have two dimensions (David O. Sears, P. J. Henry and Richard Kosterman, 'Egalitarian Values and Contemporary Racial Polities', in David O. Sears, James Sidanius and Lawrence Bobo, eds, Racialized Politics: The Debate About Racism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 75-117). We found some limited evidence for this and created two separate egalitarianism scales and adjusted the conflict measures. We substituted these alternative scales in the analyses and found it made no difference to the results in any of the models.
85. The selection of appropriate measures of value conflict and ambivalence has been debated (Peffley, Knigge and Hurwitz, 'A Multiple Values Model of Political Tolerance';
86. Arthur Miller, Tor Wynn, Phil Ullrich and Mollie Marti, 'Concept and Measurement Artifact in Multiple Values and Value Conflict Models', Political Research Quarterly, 54 (2001), 407-19).
87. The most common measures used are the multiplicative measure used here (and in work by Alvarez and Brehm ('American Ambivalence Towards Abortion Policy: Development of a Heteroskedastic Probit Model of Competing Values';
88. 'Are Americans Ambivalent Towards Racial Policies?') and Griffin's ambivalence index
89. (Megan M. Thompson, Mark P. Zanna and Dale W. Griffin, 'Let's Not Be Indifferent about (Attitudinal) Ambivalence', in Richard E. Petty and Jon A. Krosnick, eds, Attitude Strength: Antecedents and Consequences (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1995), pp. 261-86). The Griffin index measures ambivalence = (P + N)/2 -|P -N|, where P equals positive comments and N corresponds to conflicting negative comments. Theoretically, the Griffin measure seems best suited for ambivalence produced by counts of arguments for and against and opposing recalled items, and less appropriate in looking at the absolute conflict between two core principles. As Steenbergen and Brewer ('The Not-So Ambivalent Public') note, however, their rescaled Griffin index correlates very highly with the multiplicative measure and produces results consistent with those generated by this measure as well. In our case, however, we can only use the multiplicative measure since we do not have counts of positive and negative comments for each value.
90. A correlation matrix between the four core values, shown in the Appendix, supports this. In terms of value conflict, we see for instance that support for limited government is negatively correlated with egalitarianism, while egalitarianism is negatively associated with moral traditionalism. When values fall into the expected ideological orientation, we find positive correlations, such as the correlation between egalitarianism and humanitarianism.
91. Andrew Harvey, 'Estimating Regression Models with Multiplicative Heteroskedasticity', Econometrica, 44 (1976), 461-65;
92. Alvarez and Brehm, 'American Ambivalence Towards Abortion Policy'.
93. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections.
94. R. Michael Alvarez, Information and Elections (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997);
95. R. Michael Alvarez and Charles H. Franklin, 'Uncertainty and Political Perceptions', Journal of Politics, 56 (1994), 671-89.
96. Howard Lavine, 'Group Ambivalence and Issue Voting in American Presidential Elections' (unpublished manuscript, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Meeting, Chicago, 2002).
97. It is quite possible that the volatility of partisanship depends on the strength of one's partisan leanings. To explore this possibility, we estimated the models among partisan subgroups and found that value conflict does occur more frequently among independents and 'leaners'. This is not surprising, as strong partisans have pure value arrangements and thus feel little conflict when considering standard partisan value choices. We cannot place much faith in these models, however, since they are tantamount to selecting on the dependent variable.
98. Achen, 'Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response'.
99. Brody and Rothenberg, 'The Instability of Partisanship';
100. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections;
101. Franklin and Jackson, 'The Dynamics of Party Identification';
102. Howell, 'Short-term Forces and Changing Partisanship'.
103. There is an alternative model that we could estimate to assess the impact of value conflict on the stability of partisanship over time, explaining partisanship in 1996 as a function of partisanship in 1994 along with the covariates we currently include in the model. Such a specification models the weighted change in partisanship between 1994 and 1996 instead of the absolute change. We estimated this alternative model and found the effects of value conflict to be identical. We do not report this result, however, as the theory makes no predictions about the direction of the change, and this model implicitly tests a directional hypothesis about partisan change. The results from this model are available from the authors upon request.
104. We also estimated a model using change in a three-point partisanship measure as the dependent variable. In this more conservative test of our hypothesis, we found a similar pattern of results, though of weaker statistical significance. We present the models with the seven-point measure of partisan change as a better assessment of the consequences of value conflict on partisan instability (over partisan change).
105. Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989);
106. Stuart Elaine Macdonald and George Rabinowitz, 'The Dynamics of Structural Realignment', American Political Science Review, 81 (1987), 775-96.