Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identity of Voters [Hardcover]

Donald Green (Author), Professor Bradley Palmquist (Author), Professor Eric Schickler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2002 | Series: The Institution for Social and Policy St

A treatment of party identification, in which three political scientists assert that identification with political parties still powerfully determines how citizens look at politics and cast their ballots. Challenging prevailing views, they build a case for the continuing theoretical and political significance of partisan identities. The authors maintain that individuals form partisan attachments early in adulthood and that these political identities, much like religious identities, tend to persist or change only slowly over time. Scandals, recessions, and landslide elections do not greatly affect party identification; large shifts in party attachments occur only when the social imagery of a party changes, as when African Americans became part of the Democratic Party in the South after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Drawing on a wealth of data analysis using individual-level and aggregate survey data from the United States and from other countries, this study seeks to offer a new perspective on party identification that will set the terms of discussion for years to come.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[S]ets forth an argument with which all future serious studies of partisanship must contend. . . . [I]mportant reading for political professionals." -- Choice

From the Publisher

The Yale ISPS Series --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st edition (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300092156
• ISBN-13: 978-0300092158
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,317,857 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars esoteric, academic, and incomplete November 9, 2003

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

This book is written primarily to an academic audience of professors and graduate students and seems based on a collection of articles written in academic journals. For those looking for a compendium of this research, this book offers a well written summarization. In particular, it does a good job of going through recent ideas of partisanship and what accounts for the changing state of party identification in the U.S. over the past fifty years. Beyond this, however, the book has some important weaknesses. In particular, its big claim to fame is in advancing a new theory of social identification to explain why people cling so tenanciously to their attachments to the Democrat or Republican party. This is fine, except they never really develop their theory in any detal (it is only explained in about 4 pages). So unless the reader is familiar with a lot of social pscyhology their explanation will not have much resonance. More importantly they provide no explicit tests of their theory. I found it ironic that authors who spend so much effort undermining the empirical weaknesses in other research, provide no direct empirical tests to validate their own claims.

6 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pathbreaking March 15, 2003

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

What is incredible about this book is its succinct restatement of the body of work these authors have worked on over the past decade and what has come to characterize the state of the field in the macropartisanship in political science. It is an easy read and will definitely become a classic