Measuring Partisanship as a Social Identity in Multi-Party Systems

There is no doubt that partisanship is a powerful influence on democratic political behavior. But there is also a lively debate on its nature and origins: Is it largely instrumental in nature and shaped by party performance and issues stances? Or is it basically a long-standing expressive identity reinforced by motivated reasoning and strong emotions? We assess the nature of partisanship in the European context, examining the measurement properties and predictive validity of a multi-item partisan identity scale included in national surveys conducted in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.K. Using a latent variable model, we show that an eight-item partisan identity scale provides greater information about partisan intensity than a standard single-item and has the same measurement properties across the three countries. In addition, the identity scale better predicts in-party voting and political participation than a measure of ideological intensity (based on both left–right self-placement and agreement with the party on key issues), providing support for an expressive approach to partisanship in several European democracies.     

Guns 'N jobs: The FDR legacy

The intrusion of war is likely to alter the standard economic voting calculus. A wartime economy is not expected to deliver the same political benefits or costs, in terms of presidential approval or votes in an election, as does a peacetime economy. The Roosevelt presidency presents a perfect target to examine economic voting in wartime. Using monthly polling data on presidential approval from late 1937 to 1945, we demonstrate that the American public suspended standard economic-voting logic during World War II. One explanation for this suspension is the enormous size of U.S. military spending. Using data on government spending from 1929 to 1950, we show that military spending had a huge effect on unemployment while the effect of non-military spending proves negligible and non-significant. It was military spending triggered by war, not the New Deal, that vanquished the Great Depression.