Partisanship is one helluva drug: Testing partisan loyalty with deviant candidates
P12-4
Presented by: David Andersen
For the past 70 years one of the central pillars of American political behavior has been the preeminence of party identification as the main driver of the vote choice. In recent years this has only strengthened. A more interesting question is now what it takes to drive partisans away from their preferred party’s candidate. In this study, we test the limits of partisan loyalty by presenting research subjects with political candidates who deviate from partisan expectations in both policy and behavior. These deviations come in two forms, policy incongruence with their party’s typical stances on prominent issues and moral failures, in the form of being caught in one of four possible scandals. We use two experimental designs, a conjoint study and a dynamic process tracing simulation and find similar results in both. We find that partisans respond to deviant candidates by decreasing their liking for those candidates but still remaining loyal behaviorally in most cases. At the extreme, when candidates both deviate in policy and experience scandal subjects become more likely to abstain from voting than defect. Only in our most extreme condition did subjects become more likely to defect to the out-party candidate rather than vote for their in-party candidate.