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The Role of Party Identification in Spatial Models of VotingChoice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2015

Romain Lachat
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Abstract

Party identification and issue preferences are central explanatory factorsin many voting choice models. Their effects on party preferences are usuallyunderstood to be additive. That is, issue preferences’ impact on partyutilities is assumed to be the same among both party identifiers andnonidentifiers. This article suggests an alternative model in which partyidentification moderates the impact of issues on the vote. The impact ofissue preferences on party utilities should be weaker among voters whoidentify with a party. This hypothesis is tested using data from four recentDutch election studies. The results show that identifying with a partysubstantially weakens the issue preference effect on party evaluations,particularly for the party with which a voter identifies.

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Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 641 - 658
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Serra Húnter Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences,Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramon Trias Fargas 25–27, 08005 Barcelona,Spain (romain.lachat@upf.edu). Thisresearch was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation(Grants PBZH1-114601 and PZ-121606). I thank Bruno Arpino, SylviaKritzinger, Lucas Leeman, Peter Selb, Wouter van der Brug and theanonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments onprevious versions. All errors remain my own. Online appendices areavailable at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.2

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