ABSTRACT
The overall message that can be distilled from this book is that partisanship is a vitally important feature of democratic politics that has widespread and profound consequences for a range of political behaviours. Yet an equally powerful implication of the majority of the chapters contained in this volume is that thinking of partisanship only in terms of an identification conceals a great deal about both the causes and consequences of partisanship. There may be many causes of stable party attachments and analyses ought to recognize this heterogeneity (see Erikson et al. 2002: 115–27, for a similar approach). We obviously would not claim that the previous chapters have resolved all enduring controversies relating to partisanship identified in our introduction. Green and Schickler’s critical commentary in their chapter has raised enough questions about the alternative attitudinal approaches to ensure that partisanship remains a ‘hot topic’ in the years and, indeed, the decades to come. Nevertheless, the essays contained in this book provide some signposts for future research. Before we identify what these are let us then briefly recap some of the previous discussion relating to the conceptualization of partisanship and its use in comparative analyses.
