Partisanship and Political Sophistication During and Outside of Election Times: A Longitudinal Analysis Using the German SOEP Survey 1984–2012

Abstract

In many established democracies, partisan attachments play a central role in guiding citizens’ attitudes as well as their political behaviour. Most importantly, partisanship has an effect on what party citizens vote for on Election Day. In general, highly politically sophisticated citizens are more likely to identify with a party compared to the less politically sophisticated. This article argues that the strength of an individual’s partisan attachment varies considerably over time. More specifically, it finds that party attachments are stronger when Election Day is close. The less politically sophisticated in particular benefit from such an effect and develop stronger attachments at election times.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research project was initiated while both authors were at the Centre for Citizenship and Democracy at the University of Leuven (Belgium). A previous version of this manuscript was presented at the Belgian–Dutch political science conference in Maastricht (2014). We thank conference participants for their insights and suggestions. Both authors contributed equally to this paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ruth Dassonneville is an assistant professor at the department of political science at Université de Montréal. Her main research interests are voting behaviour, economic voting, election forecasting and longitudinal analyses. Her work has been published in, amongst others, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics and Political Studies.

Annika Grieb works as a research fellow at the German Centre for Research on Higher Education and Science Studies (DZHW) in Hanover. Her research interests include electoral research and higher education research with a focus on quantitative methods.

Notes

1 For the analyses we consider only individuals with a personal questionnaire (netto 10–19). The data collection was carried out in various modes, namely CAPI, PAPI, and CATI (with and without interviewers). We focused on Sample ‘A German West’, ‘E Refreshment 1998’, ‘H Refreshment 2006’, ‘J Refreshment 2011’, and ‘K Refreshment 2012’.

2 Respondents answering ‘don’t know’ to the question (3.5% of the observations in the sample), were coded as missing.

3 It has been shown that not only general elections affect attitudes, but that also state elections are decisive for political learning (Huber 2013). State level elections are not held at the same day but in different years (http://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/de/landtagswahlen/wahltermine/). We controlled for state elections which did not change our results. Also state elections have shown to have a positive effect on partisanship. For the sake of clarity we included only the parsimonious model. Results are available from the authors upon request.

4 Alternatively, we included a continuous election time measure, capturing the length of time to the closest election. Including such a continuous measure instead of the binary election time variable in the models, however, does not lead to substantively different conclusions (results not shown but available from the authors).

5 It is true that religious affiliation and trade union membership heighten not only the likelihood to identify with any party but with a particular party (namely either the Christian Democratic Party CDU, or the Social Democratic Party SPD or the Leftist Party Die LINKE). Even though we do not differentiate between identifications with a particular party it is safe to include these variables as controls in the model.

6 We used the Stata xtologit package. Models are fitted via (marginal) maximum likelihood. The function is calculated by the Gauss-Hermenite quadrature (http://www.stata.com/manuals13/xtxtologit.pdf#xtxtologit).

7 Descriptives for political interest are available from the authors upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canada Research Chairs [grant number 950-231173]; the Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture [grant number 2017-NP-199028].