Competing Motives in the Partisan Mind

Party identification is generally considered the most powerful predictor of voting behaviour. Yet, after 50 years of research, scholars continue to disagree over the implications of this well-known finding. Some argue that party identification constitutes a stable affective attachment that voters are motivated to defend, whereas others argue that party identification constitutes a running tally of voters' objective evaluations. This book seeks to advance the literature beyond this impasse by relaxing the motivational assumptions underlying the literature's two dominant models.