The Myth of Zero Partisanship: Attitudes toward American Political Parties, 1964-84

Studies of attitudes toward the two major American political parties have relied on either the Center for Political Studies' open-ended party likes/dislikes questions or its party feeling thermometers. Problems arise with interpreting (1) nonresponses or balanced responses on the open-ended items as indicators of neutrality and (2) the thermometers at face value. Discriminant analysis can address these problems by extrapolating from the thermometers the party attitudes of those with nonresponses or balanced responses on the open-ended items. A measure based on this procedure produces far more prototypical partisans, those positive toward one party and negative toward the other, than do other studies. Positive-negatives did decline after 1964 with the infusion of young people into the electorate, the increase in independents, and the political traumas of the 1960s and 1970s, but by 1984 most Americans were positivenegatives. This reversal suggests the resiliency of electoral partisanship.