The declarations of independents: Open‐ended survey responses and the nature of non‐identification

Abstract While many Americans identify as politically “independent,” conventional wisdom suggests most are covert partisans, especially “leaners.” However, we argue that independents exhibit distinct attitudes toward political parties. Analyzing American National Election Studies open‐ended responses from 1984 to 2020, we employ structural topic models and support vector machines to explore differences in how independents and partisans express “dislikes” about the major parties. Our results show that leaning independents differ significantly from self‐identified partisans in their language and align more closely with pure independents. Furthermore, we find that independents are more likely than partisans to mention issues related to “politics”—such as political cynicism, concern about special interests, or distaste for partisan conflict—when discussing their “dislikes.” These findings suggest that independents have meaningful distinctions from partisans beyond voting behavior, cautioning against overlooking the nuances between these groups.