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Core Political Values and the Long-Term Shaping of Partisanship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2018

Geoffrey Evans  and
Anja Neundorf
Geoffrey Evans*
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Anja Neundorf
Affiliation:
School of Politics and International Relations
*
*Corresponding author: Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Party identification has been thought to provide the central organizing element for political belief systems. This article makes the contrasting case that core values concerning equality and government intervention versus individualism and free enterprise are fundamental orientations that can themselves shape partisanship. The authors evaluate these arguments in the British case using a validated multiple-item measure of core values, using ordered latent class models to estimate reciprocal effects with partisanship on panel data from the British Household Panel Study, 1991–2007. The findings demonstrate that core values are more stable than partisanship and have far stronger cross-lagged effects on partisanship than vice versa in both polarized and depolarized political contexts, for younger and older respondents, and for those with differing levels of educational attainment and income, thus demonstrating their general utility as decision-making heuristics.

Keywords

political valuespartisanshippanel datalatent class analysiscross-lagged analysis
Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 1263 - 1281
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018

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