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Release date: Sept. 1, 2004 Education Levels and Ideology May Help Drive Partisanship
Contact: The staunch party loyalty of American voters is driven more by ideology than the social identities that drove the preferences of previous generations, according to research by Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz. The result has been a realignment of party loyalty in the United States in recent decades that is helping to drive partisanship in national politics, he says. About 90 percent of Democratic and Republican identifiers voted for their own party’s presidential candidate in the 2000 election, a trend likely to hold true this year, Abramowitz says. The increasing clarity of ideological differences between the parties since the Reagan era has made it easier for citizens to choose a party based on their ideological orientations, he says. One trend Abramowitz uncovered that involves increased education levels also may help explain the increased partisanship. He found that the correlation between liberal/conservative self-identification and party affiliation is lowest for high school-educated respondents, higher for those with some college and highest among college graduates. In other words, "Liberal college graduates are more Democratic than liberal high-school graduates, and conservative college graduates are much more Republican than conservative high-school graduates," says Abramowitz. He also found this trend has increased over time, primarily among college graduates. "The trend hasn't played itself out yet so we may continue to see red states get redder and blue states get bluer." In the South, this phenomenon is helping to push the realignment of parties as traditional conservative Democrats continue to leave the party for the Republicans, he says. "As education levels in society rise, ideology and party identification become more consistent. That's not the only thing driving ideology -- another factor is the increasingly ideological polarization of the parties' leaders -- but it helps," he says. Abramowitz and Colorado State University colleague Kyle Saunders will present their findings this week at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago. Their paper, "Rational Hearts and Minds: Social Identity, Ideology and Party Identification in the American Electorate," is based on a study of national election survey data from the past 40 years. Although the rise of the GOP in the South is well documented, Abramowitz also found that Republican identification has increased substantially since the 1970s among groups outside the South, including white males, the religiously devout and Catholics. Republicans ranks increased especially among self-identified conservatives, while Republican identification declined in every subcategory of liberal identifiers. Except for African-Americans, the differences between liberals and conservatives within each group were much larger than the differences between groups. African-Americans, regardless of their ideological orientation, strongly favored the Democratic Party. Otherwise, across all social groups, liberals clearly preferred the Democratic Party and conservatives clearly preferred the Republican Party. For example, while the large majority of Hispanics identified with the Democratic Party, the large majority of conservative Hispanics identified with the Republican Party. Jews overwhelmingly identified with the Democratic Party, but conservative Jews overwhelmingly identified with the Republican Party. Wealthy liberals favored the Democrats while poor conservatives favored the Republicans. Conservative gays and lesbians preferred the Republican Party by a wide margin, while liberals who identified with the religious right (the researchers did find some) preferred the Democratic Party by a wide margin. For more political news, visit Emory's election news page. |
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