Party Misfits: How Do the Unaligned Make Up Their Minds?

• In Event: Party Loyalty across Contexts and Commitment Levels

Abstract

American political elites are today sorted and polarized on a wider range of issues than at any point in the postwar era. Recent decades have witnessed an extension of political conflict: though long divided on economic matters, the Republican and Democratic Parties are increasingly divided on non-economic issues. This extension reflects the introduction of new issues and changing positions on topics that previously cut across party lines. As such, American voters face increasingly stark electoral choices.
While this political landscape has made voting easier for some, it has made voting harder for a group we term “party misfits” – independents, moderates, and individuals who are ideologically cross-pressured. In this study, we assess the ways in which the decision-making of misfits differs from those who are better aligned with the political system. We fielded a set of novel survey experiments to a large sample of American adults to test hypotheses about the information individuals use when choosing between political candidates, as well as the ideological trade-offs that many make. We document variation with respect to: (1) the subjective importance attached to issue positions and other candidate attributes when voting, (2) the quantity of information used when deciding who to vote for, and (3) the relationship between the ideological bundling of economic and non-economic issue positions and the difficulty of vote choice.
To measure the importance attached to candidate attributes, we presented respondents with pairs of attributes drawn from a set of 30 general characteristics and asked which attribute “is more important to you when deciding whether to vote for a political candidate.”. Each respondent completes this task multiple times. We calculate the proportion of head-to-head comparisons won, conditional on being presented. We assess how both the overall ranking of attributes and the relative importance attached to different attributes vary between misfits and the aligned.
We use constrained conjoint tasks to measure how the ideological consistency of candidates – whether they a liberal (conservative) on both economic and non-economic issues or take a combination of liberal and conservative positions – increases the difficulty of vote choice.
Our final study utilizes a novel “process-tracing'” design to evaluate how the quantity of candidate information used before voting varies by political alignment. Our approach overcomes several weaknesses of standard conjoint designs. Conjoint experiments are agnostic to the underlying model of how individuals make voting decisions. Some voters might take a weighted average of a candidate's issue positions, while others rely on minimal cues or vote based on the position of a candidate on a single issue. Fundamentally, these approaches assume that voters have the same amount of information. In contrast, our design presents respondents with two candidates and one attribute – e.g., A is a Democrat and B is Republican – and gives respondents the choice between voting for A, or B, or finding out more information. If they choose the third option, another attribute is appended to the table and the same response categories are asked. Respondents can see candidate positions on a maximum of five attributes before making their vote choice. By systematically varying the content of the first attribute listed, we test hypotheses about the usefulness of different kinds of candidate information; specifically, how the quantity of attributes sought varies if candidates first differ by their party labels, a randomly drawn issue positions, or on an issue that the respondent has previously reported being particularly important.
We find that misfits prioritize the same candidate attributes as partisans and ideologues do. Cross-pressured respondents find ideologically bundled candidates more difficult to choose between than ideologues do. Independents and moderates seek more information than partisans and ideologues do when choosing between political candidates – and party cues are less informative for these voters. And independents are the group least likely to vote on the basis of a single, important issue.
Although characterized as either inattentive or as “undercover partisans,” we argue that many misfits are, instead, sophisticated voters who face more difficult political choices – whether because of the additional information required to choose between candidates or the need to make ideological trade-offs. Our findings suggest these misfits are not some residual category but are a more complex political group who think like partisans in some ways but are distinctive in others. Moreover, we argue that the higher cognitive demands that these misfits face may contribute to political inequality and the crisis of representation. As the number of Americans who identify as non-partisan or are otherwise put off by polarized elites, greater attention will need to be paid on the heterogeneous ways in which voters make political decisions.

Authors

• Stuart Perrett, The University of Manchester

• Delia Baldassarri, New York University