The Reputational Premium: A Theory of Party Identification and Policy Reasoning
Paul M. Sniderman and Edward H. Stiglitz
Abstract
This book presents a new theory of party identification, the central concept in the study of voting. Challenging the traditional idea that voters identify with a political party out of blind emotional attachment, this pioneering book explains why party identification in contemporary American politics enables voters to make coherent policy choices. Standard approaches to the study of policy-based voting hold that voters choose based on the policy positions of the two candidates competing for their support. This study demonstrates that candidates can get a premium in support from the policy repu ... More
This book presents a new theory of party identification, the central concept in the study of voting. Challenging the traditional idea that voters identify with a political party out of blind emotional attachment, this pioneering book explains why party identification in contemporary American politics enables voters to make coherent policy choices. Standard approaches to the study of policy-based voting hold that voters choose based on the policy positions of the two candidates competing for their support. This study demonstrates that candidates can get a premium in support from the policy reputations of their parties. In particular, the book presents a theory of how partisans take account of the parties' policy reputations as a function of the competing candidates' policy positions. A central implication of this theory of reputation-centered choices is that party identification gives candidates tremendous latitude in their policy positioning. Paradoxically, it is the party supporters who understand and are in synch with the ideological logic of the American party system who open the door to a polarized politics precisely by making the best-informed choices on offer.
Keywords:
party identification,
policy-based voting,
American politics,
partisans,
American party system
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780691154145 |
| Published to Princeton Scholarship Online: October 2017 |
DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691154145.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Paul M. Sniderman, author
Stanford University
Edward H. Stiglitz, author
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