MONTANA, United States. – In a previous column titled “Why do we vote the way we do?” I drew on the research of social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels to review prospective and retrospective theories of voter behavior. A partial answer to the question of why we vote the way we do is that we do not vote expectantly based on political ideologies, but retrospectively based on our approval or disapproval of political leaders or parties.
A related issue is the role of political parties in our behavior as voters. Here I draw again on the research of Professors Achen and Bartels and seek to explore how political parties influence our vote. Both argue that “even the best-informed voters typically make decisions not based on political references or ideology, but based on who they are, that is, their social identities.”
A central aspect of democratic theory is that democracy is a methodology for converting our individually developed preferences into a collective decision. So, as voters, we maximize our political satisfaction by voting for the party that is ideologically closest to us.
However, scholars question the notion that individual preferences can be coherently aggregated, because the political belief system of most voters is a complex mix of liberal and conservative ideas. “For the majority of citizens, ideology is, at best, a by-product of party and group politics. Americans are more willing to identify with political parties than with ideologies”, say the cited authors.
Our current understanding of “identity” is that people are part of groups that have meanings for them. Thus, for American voters, political identity is more a matter of partisan identification than of political ideology. Party identifications are an emotional aggregate that transcends thought, and our party loyalties define our positions on an issue, not the other way around.
Simply put, most voters identify with a political party, and this party identification shapes their voting behavior. As scholars point out, our partisanship is simultaneously a form and a product of social identity.
Put another way: Do people vote Republican because they are conservative about the role of government, or are they conservative about the role of government because they are Republican? Do people vote for Democratic candidates because they favor government regulations, or do they favor government regulations because they are Democrats?
Apparently, we tend to choose our party affiliations based more on who we are—our social identity—than on what we think. For most of us, partisanship is more a decision of where “people like me” belong than a reflection of political ideology. So if the primary source of our political loyalties is our social identity, when voters take political positions they do so with little ideological commitment. However, party loyalty powerfully influences political behavior in modern democracies.
Achen and Bartels point out that party loyalties correlate only modestly with our political preferences and do not necessarily represent voter agreement with issues or ideology. Political parties represent their voters on a different level, in a promise to represent “people like us.”
Voters do not re-examine their political beliefs every electoral cycle, and at election time they choose a party or candidate that validates their political and social identity. “A party shapes a conceptual point of view that makes sense of the voter’s political world…That framework identifies friends and enemies, provides topics for discussion, and tells people how to think and what to believe.”
If Achen and Bartels are right, their theses about the shaping of our political beliefs have serious implications for democratic theory and practice. Among them a challenge to our basic belief that voters should be represented, not just governed, and that citizens should be actively involved in closely monitoring their government. The government must derive its powers not only from our consent, but also from our political judgments. This concept doesn’t work if we vote primarily for politicians who reflect our identity.
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