Dealignment

Dealignment refers to a secular process of generally eroding political predispositions among the citizens of advanced industrial democracies. The notion that voters' behavior is essentially guided by stable political predispositions dates back to Lazarsfeld's classic study of the 1940 U.S. presidential election. In this pathbreaking analysis, voters' electoral choices could be successfully predicted from a simple “Index of Political Predisposition,” consisting of measures of socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, and place of residence, leading to the conclusion that “a person thinks, politically, as he is, socially. Social characteristics determine political preference.” Lipset and Rokkan's social-historical cleavage model made plausible how long-standing group conflicts structured modern societies, how they became politicized, and how particular [Page 157]groups of voters came to be affiliated with certain parties. Various ways are conceivable how structural predispositions are translated into individual political attitudes and behavior. Through processes of political socialization, groups may impose specific voting norms on their members. While interacting with structurally similar persons who display certain political preferences, individuals may learn which parties are best suited for people like themselves. Group-specific values and ideologies serve as interpretive tools for politicized social structures, helping make sense of political information and lending meaning to structurally guided political behavior.

The psychological predisposition of party identification is the core component of the Michigan School's model for explaining political behavior. It is conceived as an individual's affective orientation to an important group-object in her environment, with the group being a political party. Comparable to religious identities, partisanship is seen as deeply rooted in individuals'personalities and thus very stable. In voters'minds, it lends order to the complexities of the political sphere by defining certain elements of it as more or less relevant and by providing cues for normative assessments of these elements. Thus, it serves as a “perceptual screen,” filtering the information individuals encounter in their environment in a way that is favorable to their party. Partisanship is therefore highly functional, providing structure and meaning to ordinary persons' understanding of politics. Its roots are seen mostly in early-life, primarily familial, socialization processes.

Political predispositions are important mediators of political communication effects. Through selective exposure, reception, acceptance, and retention, they guide how information from the mass media and other sources is processed. Messages from the media, personal communication, or communication campaigns will be readily processed if they are in accordance with citizens' political predispositions but will be blocked out if they contradict these predispositions. Thus, political predispositions may be activated through congenial political communication, leading to manifest behavior that corresponds to these predispositions. At the same time, conversion through persuasive messages that are not in line with existing predispositions is a rather unlikely phenomenon, except for specific circumstances, such as a high degree of consonance in the content of political communications, and low levels of political awareness that prevent citizens from recognizing that messages they are exposed to are actually not in line with their predispositions. The moderating role of partisanship extends also to indirect forms of mediagenerated persuasion, such as priming. Concerning purely cognitive effects, most notably agenda-setting, its mere existence is important: Partisans are generally less susceptible to this kind of media influence. Thus, political predispositions channel the impact of political communication and lead to a high degree of stability in citizens' political attitudes and behavior, both at the micro level of individuals and at the macro level of entire societies.

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