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In 2000, 2004, and 2008 the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) utilized the rolling cross-section National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES) to analyze changes in self-identified party affiliation across the course of the campaigns. Using APPC's Institutions of Democracy 2012 Political Knowledge 6-wave telephone survey, conducted during the final two months of the campaign and immediately following the election, we compared shifts in party affiliation to comparable periods in those prior three elections. The analysis of the relatively shortened periods, examined as cross-sections, show a more fixed affiliation. Nonetheless, there is variability from election to election especially among self-identified Independents.
Background
Although party affiliation's role in individual political behavior in the United States has been studied since the 1940s (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944), it became a central focus in the Michigan studies of the 1950s and 1960s (Belknap and Campbell 1951; Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes 1960). Indeed, as Nie, Verba, and Petrocik (1979, 47) noted, in the 1950s and 1960s, party affiliation "was the central thread running through interpretations of American politics" where it was considered "a stable characteristic of the individual: it was likely to be inherited, it was likely to remain steady throughout the citizen's political life, and it was likely to grow in strength during that lifetime."
Party identification is important in part because of its power to predict the presi- dential vote choice (Bartels 2000). Analyzing data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) from 1952 through 2004, Bafumi and Shapiro (2009) showed that party identification achieved its highest predictive value in 1996 and 2004. Consistent with that analysis, the 2012 National Exit Poll revealed that more than nine in 10 self- identified Republicans (93%) reported casting their ballots for their party nominee, and a nearly equal proportion (92%) of self-styled Democrats sided with the Democratic incumbent president Barack Obama (Cable News Network [CNN] 2012). Indeed strong party attachment predicts straight ticket voting (Schaffner, Streb, and Wright 2001).
The drop in the number of citizens reporting a strong tie to party, a decline that occurred between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s and leveled off in the late-1970s and early-1980s, did not change the fact that most continued to identify with a party (Miller and Shanks...