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Partisan Intoxication or Policy Voting?

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  • Fowler, Anthony

Abstract

Many political scientists believe that partisanship is an arbitrary psychological attachment that exerts a drug-like effect on voters' decisions. An implication is that voters don't care much about policy or government performance, and instead, elections are just a roll call of intoxicated partisans. I review and reassess the evidence for this view, concluding that there is no compelling evidence to support it. For many empirical tests, partisan intoxication and policy voting are observationally equivalent. Rare opportunities to partially distinguish between these possibilities like the southern realignment suggest that policy voting is more prevalent. When I conduct new tests utilizing survey experiments about hypothetical candidates, the weight of the evidence favors policy voting.

Suggested Citation

  • Fowler, Anthony, 2020. "Partisan Intoxication or Policy Voting?," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 15(2), pages 141-179, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00018027a
    DOI: 10.1561/100.00018027a
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    Cited by:

    1. Rabah Arezki & Simeon Djankov & Ha Nguyen & Ivan Yotzov, 2022. "The Political Costs of Oil Price Shocks," CESifo Working Paper Series 9763, CESifo.
    2. James N. Druckman & Samara Klar & Yanna Krupnikov & Matthew Levendusky & John Barry Ryan, 2021. "Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 5(1), pages 28-38, January.

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