All That You Can(not) Leave Behind: Habituation and Vote Loyalty in the Netherlands

Scholarly work has pointed out that party loyalty develops with age. However, most of the literature has focused on two-party systems and employed party identification as the dependent variable in order to investigate this phenomenon. This article sheds more light on how this process takes place, employing a measure of party utility that is available for all the parties, and not only for the one that voters feel identified with (if they do at all). Findings suggest that preferences become more skewed toward the chosen party as choices are repeated, supporting the presence of some kind of habituation process in voting behavior even in contexts where the existence of multiple parties should in principle work against party loyalty. Moreover, repeated voting for a party is shown to partly explain the effect of age on loyalty. Habituation is, thus, argued to be essential in order to understand why volatility is strongly and significantly higher among young voters.