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Macropartisanship Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2023

Donald P. Green Open the ORCID record for Donald P. Green [Opens in a new window] ,
Brian T. Hamel Open the ORCID record for Brian T. Hamel [Opens in a new window]  and
Michael G. Miller Open the ORCID record for Michael G. Miller [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Canonical work argues that macropartisanship—the aggregate distribution of Democrats and Republicans in the country at a given time—is responsive to the economic and political environment. In other words, if times are good when Democrats are in charge (or bad when Republicans are in charge), more Americans will identify with the Democratic Party. We extend the pioneering work of MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson (1989), who analyzed macropartisanship from 1953 through 1987, to 2021, assessing whether consumer sentiment and presidential approval still influence macropartisanship in an era of nationalized elections and affective polarization. We find that change has occurred. The effect of consumer sentiment on macropartisanship is no longer statistically distinguishable from zero, and we find evidence of “structural breaks” in the macropartisanship time series. Macropartisanship appears to have become less responsive to economic swings; approval-induced changes in macropartisanship have become more fleeting over time.

Type
Special Section: Partisanship and Political Division
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 22 , Issue 3: Special Section: Partisanship and Political Division , September 2024 , pp. 599 - 608
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

*

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2OL2CM

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