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The Myth of the Independent Voter

University of California Press

Few contemporary domestic political themes have attracted more attention than the growing number of Americans who choose to call themselves Independents rather than Democrats or Republicans. As one textbook observed, "None of the other trends . . . can match the decline in partisanship and party vitality with respect to the sheer number of words written."1 The decline of partisanship has been a rare point of consensus among commentators in all parts of the political arena. Scholars and journalists, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicansall agree on this point. The conservative publicist Kevin Phillips wrote in 1982 that "the most enduring phenomenon of the years since the war in Vietnam and Watergate has been the rise in the ranks of independents."2 The authors of The Changing American Voter , judged the most distinguished contribution to political science in 1976, concluded that the "most dramatic political change in the American public over the past two decades has been the

David B. Hill and Norman R. Luttbeg, Trends in American Electoral Behavior , 2d ed. (Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock, 1983), 32.

Kevin P. Phillips, Post-Conservative America (New York: Random House, 1982), 227.

decline of partisanship."3 This view was shared a dozen years later by the New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith, who wrote that "the most important phenomenon of American politics in the past quarter century has been the rise of independent voters who have at times outnumbered Republicans."4

As we will see, not everyone shares this view. However, it remains the preferred interpretation of at least some specialists in voting behavior and a great many students of political parties. The decline of the parties is a favorite theme in American government textbooks, the repository of our discipline's conventional wisdom and the main source of undergraduates' understanding of the political system. Most writers outside political sciencehistorians, authors of big-picture interpretations of the United States, journalistsseem to take for granted the proposition that many fewer American voters are now affected by party ties.

The implications attributed to this putative growth in independence are numerous and momentous. Independents are unconstrained by partisanship from responding to election-year appeals. If more and more voters are becoming Independents, there could be wider and wider swings between the parties. Presumably this is what leads some observers to write that the increase in the number of Independents portends greater political instability. Other anticipated consequences include weaker presidential mandates, richer opportunities for third parties, partisan realignment, a more fragmented Congress, and the end of the current party system. We will examine these predictions in more detail shortly.

The implications for social science are scarcely less important. Party identification is the "foundation" of the "edifice" of conceptualizing and measuring voting associated with the National Election Studies (NES) conducted since 1952 by the

Norman H. Nie, Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik, The Changing American Voter , enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 47.

Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works (New York: Random House, 1988), 671.

University of Michigan's Center for Political Studies.5 For a generation, political scientists had believed that party identification powerfully affected voting decisions and perceptions of political events; it was "the central thread connecting the citizen and the political process."6 Assumed to be a point of stability in individual behavior, party identification was the baseline against which researchers measured the impact of short-term forces like issues, candidates, and assessments of governmental performance.7

In its modern meaning, "party identification" is a product of survey research. Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are identified by asking respondents to put themselves in one of these three categories. The portentous trend from partisanship to independence reflects an increase in the proportion of respondents who tell interviewers that they consider themselves not Republicans or Democrats but Independents. In the Michigan NES, the share of Independents went from 19 to 23 percent in the 19521964 period to a high of 37

Donald R. Kinder and David O. Sears, "Public Opinion and Political Action," in Handbook of Social Psychology , vol. 2, 3d ed., ed. Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson (New York: Random House, 1985), 684.

The Michigan election research has had various labels since 1952. In the early years it was identified with the university's Survey Research Center and then took the name of the Center for Political Studies (CPS) when that unit was formed in the 1960s. Although still conducted by the CPS, the research has been called the National Election Studies (NES) since the creation in 1977 of a national board of overseers consequent to the first long-term multimillion-dollar grant to the CPS from the National Science Foundation.

The Michigan Survey Research Center conducted a national sample survey of sorts in 1948. For a variety of reasons, this study has had little visibility or influence, so our chronology of "the Michigan school" begins with the 1952 study.

Nie, Verba, and Petrocik, The Changing American Voter , 73.

One well-known example is the central place of party identification in calculating the "normal vote," a method used to identify groups that respond in different ways in a given election. See Philip E. Converse, "The Concept of a Normal Vote," in Angus Campbell et al., Elections and the Political Order (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966), 939.

percent in 1978. In 1990, 36 percent of the NES sample called themselves Independents.

Any NES respondent who claimed to be an Independent has always been asked if he or she was closer to one or the other party. Until we began our research, analysts of the NES datathe major source of information about individual political behaviorseldom paid attention to this follow-up question. Independents were all those people who claimed this status when answering the initial question about party identification. This book results from our discovery more than fifteen years ago that the second question is essential to an understanding of Independents because it enables analysts to distinguish genuine Independents from those who initially claim this status but then concede that they lean toward the Democrats or Republicans. Thus we can dispel the assumption, once almost universal and still widespread, that all Independents"the second largest group in the electorate"share some characteristics that differentiate them in important ways from Republicans and Democrats.8 This assumption is wrong. Independents, defined inclusively, have little in common. They are more diverse than either Republicans or Democrats. Most of them are not uncommitted, and they are not a bloc. They are largely closet Democrats and Republicans .

Therefore, none of the large generalizations about Independents is correct because as Independents are usually defined, the category includes not one but three kinds of people. Most of the increase in Independents has occurred among the hidden partisans; the high-level speculations apply only to genuine Independents, whose increase has...