Comparisons of Party Identification and Policy Preferences: The Impact of Survey Question Format

Much research has suggested that citizens' political party affiliations are more persistent over time and more psychologically consequential than are their attitudes toward government policies. However, most surveys have measured party identification with branching questions in which all response alternatives were verbally labeled, whereas policy preferences have typically been measured using nonbranching questions with incomplete verbal labeling of response alternatives. We report eight experiments, involving telephone interviewing, face-to-face interviewing, and self-administered questionnaires, demonstrating that fully labeled branching measures of party identification and policy attitudes are more reliable than partially labeled nonbranching measures of those attitudes. This difference seems to be attributable to effects of both verbal labeling and branching. Thus, it appears that previous findings regarding differences between party identification and policy preferences are partly due to the failure to equate the formats of survey questions measuring those attitudes.