European Party Loyalties Revisited

The likelihood that party loyalties reflect the characteristics of parties and political competition within specific political environments was generally ignored in critiques of party identification abroad. In this article, I identify substantial frequencies of stable partisan ties among British, Dutch, and German voters in the 1960s through the 1980s. Stable party loyalists in turn usually vote for their preferred party in subsequent elections. Long-term partisan ties are most common among supporters of traditional cleavage parties. These long-term party loyalties reflect the effects of both long-standing hostilities toward opposing parties and well-developed party principles. Since partisan responses are internally consistent and subsume ideational as well as affective components, these feelings resemble social psychology's affect-laden schemata.