The dynamics of partisanship within election cycles
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Is party identification immovable and immune from short-term influences or is it swayed by political dynamics that arise during campaigns and elections? Social scientists have debate the answer to this question for over fifty years while relying on data that measures partisanship between elections. This dissertation incorporates data from two unique sources to offer a look into how partisanship behaves within election cycles. First, I observe individual-level systematic changes in partisanship over the course of the 2008 presidential election campaign using 10-wave panel data covering the 13 months leading up to the election. Partisanship becomes entangled by and confused with vote intention. Furthermore, these changes cannot be accounted for by measurement error alone. Next, I use the same data set to evaluate the relative stability of partisanship compared to a diverse set of attitudes and find it as stable, but not more stable, than ideology or evaluations of president's job performance. Finally, by bringing together an aggregate set of data composed of over 160 high quality commercial and academic public opinion polls, I am able to corroborate the patterns found in 2008. Overall, partisan intensity decreases closer to elections and increases further away from the glare and mixed messages of a campaign. Implications for how we understand American politics are discussed.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Cobb, Curtiss L III |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology. |
| Primary advisor | Parigi, Paolo, 1973- |
| Primary advisor | Sandefur, Rebecca, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Parigi, Paolo, 1973- |
| Thesis advisor | Sandefur, Rebecca, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Nie, Norman H |
| Advisor | Nie, Norman H |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Curtiss L. Cobb, III. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2011 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Curtiss Lee Cobb
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...