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The Limits of Partisan Loyalty

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Abstract

While partisan cues tend to dominate political choice, prior work shows that competing information can rival the effects of partisanship if it relates to salient political issues. But what are the limits of partisan loyalty? How much electoral leeway do co-partisan candidates have to deviate from the party line on important issues? We answer this question using conjoint survey experiments that characterize the role of partisanship relative to issues. We demonstrate a pattern of conditional party loyalty. Partisanship dominates electoral choice when elections center on low-salience issues. But while partisan loyalty is strong, it is finite: the average voter is more likely than not to vote for the co-partisan candidate until that candidate takes dissonant stances on four or more salient issues. These findings illuminate when and why partisanship fails to dominate political choice. They also suggest that, on many issues, public opinion minimally constrains politicians.

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Notes

  1. Gerber et al. (2011) is the closest comparison in prior work to our current study, but focuses on a different research question. Specifically, the study documents individual differences in the extent to which citizens are confident in their ability to assess policy proposals and, accordingly, reward or punish representatives for adopting positions on them.

  2. Online Appendix B provides an example of how these profiles looked to respondents.

  3. http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2016/images/05/04/rel6b.-.2016.general.pdf.

  4. The race/ethnicity of the candidate profiles was weighted to resemble the distribution of members of Congress at the time the survey was run.

  5. Because of our focus on choice in settings with opposing party candidates we exclude 10,778 profile pairs in which the candidates had the same party label and individuals were unable to choose between them on this factor.

  6. For this analysis we are only able to examine up to 4 issue agreements because one candidate position item (immigration policy) could not be mapped back to the individual policy position question.

  7. We note here that there is minimal heterogeneity in these results by party, see Online Appendix D.

  8. The analysis in Fig. 1 does not differentiate between different types of issues. When we consider their influence separately in Online Appendix A, agreement on Obamacare is more influential than the other three issues, although all exert a substantial influence on candidate choice.

  9. These results characterize the response of the average partisan in our experiment. For brevity, we may refer to “voters,” “respondents” or “individuals” in the aggregate throughout.

  10. In keeping with this assertion, Chong and Mullinix (n.d.) find that policy information has the greatest impact on policy support if it contains information on the ideological direction of the proposal.

  11. While self-reports placed the Birth Control issue as high-salience for Study 1, our approach in Study 2 categorizes it as minimally divisive.

  12. See Online Appendix B for additional information on the pre-testing procedure and validation of this issue typology.

  13. These dynamics are similar when examining support for out-party candidates, but there is a substantially lower baseline level of support across conditions. These results are presented in Online Appendix D

  14. This sample only included ‘Strong’ or ‘Not very strong’ partisans, excluding partisan leaners and independents.

  15. For instance, comparing the ideology of general election candidates for Congress using measures of ideology based on a candidate’s campaign finance receipts, shows that no races in 2014 (the most recent year available) involved a Democratic candidate that was more conservative than their Republican opponent (Bonica 2014).

  16. As in other work, we include partisan “leaners” with the party they are closest with and exclude “pure” independents.

  17. We note that this divergence in base rates would not affect the marginal effects we display above, (since the baseline divergence would difference out in those estimates), but may impact our analysis of the likelihood of partisan defection (Figs. 2 and 4) which relies on predicted probabilities.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Jeremy Ferwerda, Martin Gilens, Justin Grimmer, Greg Huber, Lilliana Mason, Lilla Orr, Markus Prior and Lauren Wright for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Princeton University, 211 Fisher Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Jonathan Mummolo

  2. Texas A&M University, 2010 Allen Building, 4348 TAMU, College Station, TX, 77843, USA

    Erik Peterson

  3. Dartmouth College, 211 Silsby Hall 3 Tuck Mall, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA

    Sean Westwood

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  1. Jonathan Mummolo
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Correspondence to Sean Westwood.

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Mummolo, J., Peterson, E. & Westwood, S. The Limits of Partisan Loyalty. Polit Behav 43, 949–972 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09576-3

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