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Political Behavior

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01-12-2009 | Original Paper

Inheritance and the Dynamics of Party Identification

Authors: Martin Kroh, Peter Selb

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 4/2009

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Abstract

Extensive research efforts notwithstanding, scholars continue to disagree on the nature and meaning of party identification. Traditionalists conceive of partisanship as a largely affective attachment to a political party that emerges in childhood through parental influences and tends to persist throughout life. The revisionist conception of partisanship is that of a running tally of party utilities that is updated based on current party performance. We attempt to reconcile both schools of thought in an individual difference perspective, showing that the party loyalties acquired through parental influences confirm better the traditional view, while the attachments of individuals who did not inherit their parents’ party loyalties exhibit features more closely matching the revisionist predictions. The analysis is facilitated by uniquely suited longitudinal household data emanating from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study that allow to study party identifications of young adults and their parents on an annual basis from 1984 to 2007.

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We follow common practice and use the terms party identification, partisanship, party affiliation, loyalty, attachment, and leanings interchangeably.

For a traditionalist critique of Achen’s model, again, see Gerber and Green (1998).

Currently, SOEP surveys 24,000 individuals in 12,000 households. The data set consists of seven sub-samples, drawn from the population living in Germany at different points in time, in order to compensate for panel attrition and to allow for group-specific analyses (Kroh and Spiess 2008).

The difference in question formats leads to higher rates of independents in European surveys as compared to US data. In a cross-sectional perspective, almost 40% of the SOEP sample reported in the 1980s not to support any party, today this figure hovers around 50%. However, taking a longitudinal perspective, we find that almost 90% of the sample in the 1980s name at least once a party in a five-year period and today this still holds for more than 70% of the sample. We therefore conclude a high prevalence of partisanships in Germany despite the inflated cross-sectional rates of independents.

As reported in the review of the socialization literature, several studies suggest that the transmission of party identifications may even start at a time when young children themselves lack a basic understanding of political processes and events (e.g., Greenstein 1965). Other authors, however, date the formation of an initial party identification as late as in the mid-20s (Alwin et al. 1991; Jennings and Niemi 1981; Jennings and Markus 1984). Due to these ambiguities, many scholars use the first vote as crystallization of the initial political preferences (Campbell et al. 1960; Hyman 1959). For a critical review, see Sears and Valentino (1997). We therefore employ a very broad definition of the formative years, considering parents’ partisanship during their offspring’s entire childhood. We define the age of 17 as terminating this period of parental primacy and beginning a second period in which young adults potentially start incorporating externally available political information.

At a maximum level, we observe the partisanship of both mother and father in these 17 years. At a minimum level, we consider at least 2 years of information on (single) parents’ party identification as sufficient to define the socializing experience of young adults.

Based on the available partisan statements of parents, other procedures for building a compound measure of the political color of parental households can be used. For instance, one could weight recent statements more heavily in the construction of such a measure than parents’ partisanship 15 years before. We refrain from such an approach as our measure of parental partisanship is not primarily meant to maximize the prediction of young adults’ initial partisanship but is designed to also capture the steady partisan cues provided by parents during their offspring’s childhood that may plausibly affect the persistence of young adults’ partisanship.

Although the SOEP on principle is a random sample of the population living in Germany, the analyzed sample in the present analysis is not representative of the general population at a single point in time but of the cohorts born between 1969 and 1989. For the first cohort of 1969, for instance, we obtain the minimum of two observations on parental partisanship in the waves 1984 and 1985 when respondents themselves are 15 and 16 years old. The initial partisanship of the 1969 cohort is then measured in the subsequent waves 1986, 1987, or 1988 at age 17, 18, or 19. However, our sample is selective in that it only contains individuals for whom we also have sufficient information on their parents.

If both state and trait dependence were governing individual party identification, the term true state dependence would be used to denote the effect of a recent (change in a) party leaning on present partisanship, controlling for trait dependence.

Note that we restrict our sample to those adolescents who do report an initial party identification at age 17–19 and ignore respondents who remain indifferent. Young adults from indifferent settings as well as those from partisan households who did not take up their parents views are highly similar in terms of the dynamic behavior of their party identifications and subsequent analyses. We therefore treat these two groups jointly as representing non-inherited party identifications.

We have also fitted a baseline model that omits the lagged and the initial party identification. The estimates suggest, in contrast to the findings of Table 1, that, on average, the inheritance group is less likely to report political indifference.

Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing to this.

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Title: Inheritance and the Dynamics of Party Identification
Authors: Martin Kroh
Peter Selb
Publication date: 01-12-2009
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Political Behavior / Issue 4/2009
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-009-9084-2

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