ABSTRACT
Partisanship, defined quite simply as a long term tendency to support one party rather than another, has been at the centre of debates about voting and mass political behaviour for the last 60 years and it is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future (Geer 2002; Fiorina 2002; Weisberg and Greene 2003; Johnston 2006; Dalton 2006). Yet while there is widespread agreement about the need to account for these predispositions there is also widespread disagreement about its causes and how these should be measured. Worse, there is often a failure to recognize that there are fundamental disagreements. Embarrassingly, many participants in these debates talk past each other: either using the same words to describe different things or different words to describe the same thing.
