Scholars have long debated whether partisanship is indeed a stable identity or whether individuals update their partisanship in response to short-term influences. Given the enormous impact of party identification on vote choice, this debate has vital implications for democratic accountability. Do voters hold fast to their existing identities even in the face of credible information that suggests that they should change? If so, under what conditions might this resistance be overcome? This dissertation seeks to develop a process model of identification to address these important questions.
Across the literature on partisanship, as across much of our discipline, there seems to be a critical disjuncture between scholarship rooted in the economic "rational actor" tradition and that rooted in social psychology. To facilitate a more constructive debate would be to broadly impact scholarly dialogue. Some revisionist scholars have attempted to find common ground between these camps but scholarship tends to dichotomize between "rational" factors that lead partisans to update and "irrational" forces that pull them back to their group attachments.
This dissertation attempts to reframe the debate over partisan dynamics by asking what psychological processes allow partisans to maintain stable identities. Specifically, when partisans realize that one or more of their opinions conflicts with their party identity, I hypothesize that they re-justify their identity on the basis of a lesser of two evils argument. They tell themselves, "I may not like my own party very much, but the other party is worse." Keeping with this logic, I hypothesize that partisan change occurs when this process breaks down and identities drift with affective cues.
I will test this theory through a series of national and local experiments in which partisans are put into situations were they disagree with their party. This will allow me to examine the relationship between partisanship and the underlying attitudes that help to stabilize it in the face of contrary information. Then, by replicating this study and manipulating the cognitive resources available to individuals, I will attempt to impede cognitive defenses and produce partisan change. In a final experiment, which employs affective priming, I will look at the other side of the coin and explore whether partisan change might occur through "affective coloration." This series of studies is designed to outline the process of partisan maintenance and also to shed light on the normative consequences of partisan change. The implication here is that even if partisanship does change over time, it may not be the result of thoughtful consideration as we would hope for it to be.
