Why party identification has weakened

Citizens now report record levels of distrust in parties as part of a slow decline in trust in government more generally. Fewer than 20 percent of Americans report that they can trust the government to do what is right most of the time. After the federal government shutdown of , trust in Congress plummeted to a mere 7 percent, although it has been low since the financial crisis. While these trends parallel a decline in trust across institutions, including the media, big business, and organized religion, they also relate to partisanship.

Republicans are more likely to trust government when their party is in power, and less likely to trust it when out of power; the same is true for Democrats. Parties have also become more ideologically cohesive in the United States.

While this kind of polarization is often useful in helping voters identify a clear party of the left and right, partisanship today has resulted not in more trust in parties, but more antipathy. Political rhetoric has grown more hostile, and negotiation and compromise between the parties seems, at times, impossible. Among voters, partisans increasingly map their social identities onto their partisan ones.

As a result, Liliana Mason finds that Democratic and Republican voters are less willing to accept compromise. Intense partisans stand in contrast to those who feel turned off by partisanship.

Voters identifying as independents now outnumber those who identify as Republicans or Democrats, and the share of independents in the electorate has been rising steadily.

What are the effects of these trends in party identification? Instead, they are likely to be alienated from parties and politics and to be more concerned with, say, corruption than with policy issues such as the economy or health care. Unease with parties is not limited to the United States.

In Western European countries, where party membership is often formalized — party members pay dues and receive formal party benefits — partisan voters are also on the decline. Party membership has been reduced by nearly half since ; this trend is particularly pronounced in the Nordic countries, France, Italy, and Britain. Globalization, economic inequality, declines in manufacturing, immigration, and a new assertiveness among illiberal leaders all play a role in voter discontent.

However, in this period, party organizations themselves have remained robust. Parties run sophisticated operations with large paid staff, professional party elites, and a network of affiliated public relations and marketing firms. Parties maintain sophisticated databases of their supporters; there is an industry of firms that help with outreach and mobilization.

One reason for the robust empirical relationship between strong parties and stable democracy is related to the important role that parties perform as gatekeepers. Party leaders have a stake in the longevity of the party itself, rather than any individual politician. Because democracy is a repeated game, party leaders have incentives to sustain party organizations across successive elections.

Political parties therefore function as gatekeepers in the democratic process, keeping radical candidates and ideas out of mainstream politics. Candidates in the United States and Europe almost always run under the banner of a party, and party leaders tend to support candidates who have a chance of winning. This has often entailed choosing moderates over extremists. However, the candidate selection process has become distorted by a number of factors. First, American and European parties have adopted more internal democracy, letting members choose candidates instead of relying on party elites alone.

This has undermined the traditional role of party elites in candidate selection, and it is this plebiscitary trend , according to Frances Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, that makes it impossible for party leaders to form consensus over nominees and policies.

In How Democracies Die , Ziblatt and Levitsky lay the blame for the rise of political outsiders squarely on the inability of parties to manage candidate selection. Another challenge to gatekeeping is money in politics.

Parties used to have more control over financing of campaigns and party activities. The world of campaign finance, however, has become more diffuse. The Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act limited the soft money parties could raise and use, and a series of Supreme Court decisions protects political money as a constitutional right.

There are debates about what this means for parties. While there is some evidence that states that allow parties greater control over financing elect more moderate politicians, others argue that the diffuse world of finance is simply an extension of party control.

Regardless, candidates for office now face a set of stakeholders and donors beyond their own parties and constituencies. Outside groups can also perform many of the duties once left to parties, including campaign advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts. A final challenge to gatekeeping has to do with technology and the ease with which outsiders can connect with voters. The internet and social media provide individual candidates with cheap forms of outreach, circumventing traditional ways of coming up through the party system.

The Five Star party in Italy, which has the most seats in Parliament, began as an internet party. This seven-point party identification scale is in the dataset. The direct influence of party identification on the vote is small in presidential elections. Very few voters probably cast a ballot for Bush solely because he was a Republican. But the indirect influence of party identification is great, in that partisan loyalties influence evaluations of candidates, assessments of government performance, and perceptions of political events.

In other words, many Americans are so dissatisfied with politics and turned off by how ugly and partisan it has become that they now refuse to openly identify with either party — even though most still consistently back one party. This is troubling because it suggests that Americans not only are less willing to share their political beliefs but also no longer engage in politics in ways that go beyond just voting — developments that have negative ramifications for the health of our democracy.

The abandonment of voters openly identifying with one of the two parties has led to less political engagement, which means Americans are exerting less influence on what the parties look and sound like. As political scientist and FiveThirtyEight contributor Julia Azari wrote for Vox in , the defining characteristic of our politics may be that the parties are weak while partisanship is quite strong.

Geoffrey Skelley is an elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight.