Party Affiliation, Partisanship, and Political Beliefs: A Field Experiment

Alan S. Gerber, Gregory A. Huber and Ebonya Washington

No 15365, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Political partisanship is strongly correlated with attitudes and behavior, but it is unclear from this pattern whether partisan identity has a causal effect on political behavior and attitudes. We report the results of a field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of party identification. Prior to the February 2008 Connecticut presidential primary, researchers sent a mailing to a random sample of unaffiliated registered voters informing them of the need to register in order to participate in the upcoming primary. Comparing post-treatment survey responses to subjects' baseline survey responses, we find that those informed of the need to register with a party were more likely to affiliate with a party and subsequently showed stronger partisanship. Further, we find that the treatment group also demonstrated greater concordance than the control group between their pre-treatment latent partisanship and their post-treatment reported voting behavior and intentions and evaluations of partisan figures. Thus our treatment, which caused a strengthening of partisan identity, also caused a shift in subjects' candidate preferences and evaluations of salient political figures. This finding is consistent with the claim that partisanship is an active force changing how citizens behave in and perceive the political world.

JEL-codes: D72 H0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-pol
Note: POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as ALAN S. GERBER & GREGORY A. HUBER & EBONYA WASHINGTON, 2010. "Party Affiliation, Partisanship, and Political Beliefs: A Field Experiment," American Political Science Review, vol 104(04), pages 720-744.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15365.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15365

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15365

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().