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Political Independence in America, Part I: On Being an Independent Partisan Supporter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Extract

With the decline in popular attachment to the two major parties in the United States since the mid-1960s, collective political independence has risen. Using new survey questions introduced in 1980, this article employs alternative measures of independence to reassess the phenomenon of independence in America. These new measures give us fresh insights beyond what we had using only the traditional measures. One casualty of this new approach is the portrait of the Independent given by The American Voter. This portrait appears seriously misleading, given that it is those who deny being either partisan or Independent who fit that portrait – not Independents per se. And the most politically involved voters turn out to be Independent Partisan Supporters; not simple partisans.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

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18 A subcommittee of the 1980 NES Study Committee developed new measures in the area of partisanship. The members of the subcommittee were Richard Brody, Herbert Weisberg and the present author.

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21 See Wattenberg, Martin P., The Decline of American Political Parties: 1952–1980 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 1984)Google Scholar for an analysis of the possible extent of such growing indifference.

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32 The authors who came closest to finding a parallel path to the present one through these problems of reconceptualization and measurement are John R. Van Wingen and David C. Valentine. See especially their ‘Biases in the Partisan Identification Index as a Measure of Partisanship’, Department of Political Science, University of Southern Mississippi, 1980Google Scholar, which uses the 1976 NES data.

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34 See Figure 4. The natural scoring on these items was reversed in computing the Index of Political Involvement.

35 For more discussion of how to measure party system support, see Dennis, Jack, ‘Support for the Party System by the Mass Public’, ‘Trends in Public Support for the American Party System’, ‘Changing Public Support for the American Party System’, in Crotty, William J., ed., Paths to Political Reform (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1980) pp. 3566Google Scholar; and ‘Public Support for the Party System, 1964–1984’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 08 1986.Google Scholar

36 For a useful introduction to this technique, see Klecka, William R., Discriminant Analysis (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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38 That Independent Partisan Supporters are relatively positive towards the party system is shown in some of the data from the Pilot Study that preceded the P1 survey. (The Pilot Study was conducted in 1979.) Pilot Study respondents were asked to agree or disagree, along a seven-point scale, with the following: ‘Democracy works best where competition between parties is strong’. Among Independent Partisan Supporters 59 per cent agreed very strongly (point 7 on the 7-point scale). This is in contrast to Ordinary Partisans (23 per cent). Among the Unattached and Ordinary Independents the proportions were 26 and 27 per cent respectively.