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Changing parties, changing partisans: the personalization of partisan attachments in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands
[working paper]
Corporate Editor
GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
Abstract "This paper investigates the effects of the deep transformations undergone by West European parties in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall fall on their relationship with the electorate. Attention is devoted in particular to the changing content of individuals' partisan attachments, which we hypothesiz... view more
"This paper investigates the effects of the deep transformations undergone by West European parties in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall fall on their relationship with the electorate. Attention is devoted in particular to the changing content of individuals' partisan attachments, which we hypothesize to have changed from a mere reflection of previous social and ideological identities to the result of individual attitudes towards parties and partisan objects. The main objective of this analysis is to show the nowadays prominent part played by voters' attitudes towards one of these 'objects' - party leaders - in determining psychological attachments with the parties. We concentrate on the main two cleavage-based parties in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands in the period between 1990 and the most recent election for which National Election Study data is available. By means of logistic regression analysis, it is shown the constantly declining ability of 'identity' items (e.g., social class, union membership, church attendance, region of residence) to predict individual feelings of partisan attachment, as well as the correspondingly growing part played by voters' attitudes towards issues, performance evaluation, and party leaders - the latter having become nowadays of crucial relevance in each country under analysis." (author's abstract)... view less
Keywords
voting behavior; Netherlands; Italy; party; voter; Western Europe; election; Federal Republic of Germany; political attitude; partiality
Classification
Social Psychology
Political Process, Elections, Political Sociology, Political Culture
Method
empirical
Document language
English
Publication Year
2011
City
Bonn
Page/Pages
29 p.
Series
GESIS-Working Papers, 2011/12
Licence
Deposit Licence - No Redistribution, No Modifications