Drivers of partisanship: liking/disliking or policy preferences?

We know from the election studies literature that political attitudes and behaviour are motivated by a mixture of cognitive and emotional factors. The aim of this paper is to gain greater clarity about the factors driving partisan identification and willingness to act on behalf of the party to progress its political agenda. To do this, we conducted three online studies. The first study compared the relative effects of positive and negative party identification. The second and third studies introduced policy preferences. Taken together, the three studies suggest that (a) in-party liking was the stronger correlate of party loyalty and willingness to act than out-party disliking, (b) qualifying these results, the pair-comparison analysis showed that policy preferences played a more prominent role in perceptions than in-party liking and out-party disliking, and (c) out-party disliking was related to intransigence in the sense of unwillingness to compromise. These findings have implications for the direction of further research on party identification.