ABSTRACT
Partisanship has long been a central organizing concept in the study of American political behavior. Early studies of electoral behavior examined political behavior in terms of the individual characteristics of voters and found that characteristics such as age, gender, education, income, occupation, religion, and race are all significant determinants of political behavior (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Berelson et al. 1954). In their seminal work, The American Voter, Campbell et al. (1960) found that partisanship, a psychological attachment to a political party, also shapes political attitudes and behaviors. Using a socio-psychological approach, the authors presented voting as the outcome of a sequence of influential factors. Illustrating this point through a “funnel of causality,” they argue that partisan attachment results from the process of socialization, stemming from childhood and reflecting the influences of family and social environment. Partisanship is therefore fixed and one of the most influential determinants of political behavior, predicting participation among the general population (e.g. Conway 1991; Rosenstone and Hansen 1993) and among racial and ethnic groups (e.g. Lien 1994; Uhlaner 1996; Kam and Ortiz 1998).
