Abstract
Like fine wines, social science concepts are often thought not to travel well from their country of origin. One of the most contentious of such concepts in European political science has been that of party identification. Developed in the 1950s at the University of Michigan, party identification was used to explain the stable partisan alignment of an American electorate who for the most part did not possess sufficient or consistent ideological awareness to promote a so-called ‘normal’ vote — a socialised default setting for party choice from which voters might stray in the short term but to which they eventually returned. Instead, Michigan researchers ascribed voting choice to a psychological attachment to a particular party. Disagreement arose in the application of the concept to European cases, and especially to France.
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Evans, J.A.J. (2004). Ideology and Party Identification: A Normalisation of French Voting Anchors?. In: Lewis-Beck, M.S. (eds) The French Voter. French Politics, Society and Culture Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523791_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523791_4
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