Party Identification

The Michigan Social Psychological Concept

Party identification was originally defined in The American Voter by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes (1960) as “the individual's affective orientation to an important group object in his environment” (p. 121). In U.S. politics, with its stable two-party system, the Republican and Democratic parties function as these “important group objects,” offering political orientation to their supporters. Campbell et al. did not assume that this is self-evident but conceded that other groups are able to function as political reference groups as well, such as unions and religious or ethnic groups. Whether parties do indeed fulfill this orientation function for a large part of the national electorate is one of the questions that have to be answered when the original American concept is applied in other countries. The basic assumption of the Michigan approach is first of all that voters depend on such groups for political orientation, this being originally derived from reference group theory in mainstream social psychology of the 1940s and 1950s.

The classical Michigan concept of party identification became one of the cornerstones of voting research, first in the United States but to so some extent also in Europe and Japan. Its standard measure is asked in all American National Election Studies: “Generally speaking, do you think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?” The independents are then asked, whether they think of themselves as closer to the Republican or Democratic Party, leading to the support type of “leaners.” The self-identified Republicans and Democrats are further categorized as strong or weak, depending on their answer as to whether they think of themselves as strong or not very strong Republicans or Democrats. The end result is a categorization of the American electorate into seven groups, running from strong to weak Republicans, to Independents leaning toward the Republican Party, to Independents, to the equivalent groups on the Democratic side. Much of the literature focuses on the reliability of this measurement, which combines direction and strength of attachment in one scale. Not denying the importance of the respective methodological controversy, the basic question concerns the concept validity of the directional component: Do the various measures of identification with a party measure what they are supposed to measure?

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