ECPR 2023 | Vortrag mit Martin Elff und ZU Alumna Hannah Rajski

Vom 04. bis 08. September 2023 fand die General Conference des European Consortium for Political Research an der Charles University in Prag statt. ZU Alumna und ehemalige studentische Hilfskraft am Lehrstuhl für Politische Soziologie Hannah Rajski und Martin Elff haben dort zum Thema "The Effect of Incumbents’ Partisanship on the Formation of Party Identification" präsentiert.

Titel: The Effect of Incumbents’ Partisanship on the Formation of Party Identification
Autor:innen: Hannah Rajski and Martin Elff
Abstract:
Party Identification (PID) is a central concept for explaining and predicting not only electoral choices but also issue attitudes and political perception. The traditional conception of PID attributes its formation mostly to citizens’ primary socialization by family and primary social groups. While it has often been debated in the literature whether PID really is an ‘unmoved mover’ or subject to feedback effects from the political performance of party candidates or their issue positions, this discussion has usually focused on the national level.
We complement this perspective in two ways: first, by looking at feedback effects that originate at the level of individual U.S. states, and second, by looking at the socialization effects of the partisanship of presidents and state governments. Using multilevel ordered logit modeling applied to cumulated American National Election Studies data from 1952 to 1992, we show that even after controlling for parental PID and other predictors, the party not only of the U.S. president but also of the governor of the state experienced during adolescence and early adulthood affects the formation of PID. Our results confirm the importance of the political context experienced during late adolescence and early adulthood for a complete understanding of citizens’ party identification.