Party Identification in Emotional and Political Context: A Replication

Abstract

While testing an affective measure of party identification Burden and Klofstad (2005) found that using the phrase, "feel that you are," in place of, "think of yourself as," significantly shifted PID in a Republican direction. I adopt the theoretical framework of Affective Intelligence (Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000) to specify how the timing of their question-wording experiment may have influenced the results. I suggest that the outcome was a function of (a) anxiety present during the survey, which ran just after 9/11 of 2001, coupled with (b) a political environment that favored Republicans. In a 2005 survey I replicate the experiment and collect new measures with which to test expectations. I find no significant shift in PID, and provisional support for the Affective Intelligence explanation. The results validate Burden and Klofstad's measure, qualify their findings, and test the application of the theory of Affective Intelligence to party dispositions. Alternative explanations and directions for further research are discussed.Party identification lies at the center of the study of political attitudes and behavior. Over the past half century the concept first developed in the American Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960) has been revisited and revised, but it remains a key element to understanding individuals' political tendencies. One aspect of party identification (PID) that has drawn much deserved attention is its stability. Although opinions vary on how and when it moves (Fiorina,

Measuring Partisanship as a Social Identity in Multi-Party Systems

“…In the U.S., there is conflicting evidence on whether or not this wording makes a difference. Burden and Klfostad (2005) find that it does and regard the ''feel'' question as a more accurate measure of partisanship whereas Neely (2007) finds it makes no difference. At a minimum, it is important to ask the same stem partisanship question across contexts to standardize the measurement of partisan identity.…”

My Heart Says One Thing but My Head Says Another? Men, Women, and the Psychology of Partisanship in Britain

“…It may also be able to account for the observed generational differences, given that the discursive association between women and the Labour Party is a more recent phenomenon than the parallel costereotyping between women and the Democratic Party. Finally, the fact that Neely (2007) could replicate Burden and Klofstad's experiment, but not their results in a survey a few years later, tends to support the conclusion that these experimental effects are driven by the external context rather than being inherent in the responses of either men or women.…”

Physiological Responses and Partisan Bias: Beyond Self-Reported Measures of Party Identification

“…These findings extend extant research in two important ways. First of all, they provide additional evidence of the need to distinguish between the instrumental and affective components of party identification [ 16 – 17 , 31 ]. Hence, we find distinct effects among party identifiers who do not show signs of affective reactions to their party relative to those identifiers who do display strong affective reactions.…”

“…At the same time, knowledge about the measurement problems relating to an exclusive reliance on self-reported answers has grown exponentially in recent decades [ 13 – 15 ]. These problems are also evident in the context of self-reported measures of party identification [ 16 – 17 ]. While the party identification measure was designed to gauge “the individual’s affective orientation” towards a party (p. 121 in [ 7 ], our emphasis), recent research has demonstrated that the measure is conflated because it also taps a number of instrumental considerations [ 16 – 18 ]—in particular, the proximity between the voter’s general preferences and the party’s overall positions [ 19 ].…”