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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 been rather modest.

The gist of our findings about Independents began to circulate among some political scientists as early as the summer of 1975 and was reported at the end of that year in a textbook

Gerald M. Pomper et al., The Election of 1976 (New York: David McKay, 1977), 73. This estimate is more modest than that of Nie, Verba, and Petrocik, who call Independents "the largest group in the society" (The Changing American Voter , 346).

coauthored by one of us.9 Our first full statement was in a paper delivered in the summer of 1977.10 Many of our early findings could have been found one place or another in the literature. Some were mentioned as an aside, an unremarked table, or a paragraph ignored in subsequent chapters. Despite some published clues and an unimaginable number of similar findings in computer printouts, our case against the monolithic conception of Independents was very much a minority view in 1977. Since then, our view has been accepted by some, considered and rejected by others, and (apparently) ignored by others. These developments are discussed at length in chapter 5.

Although we disagree with the revisionist scholars who think that party identification lost much of its importance in the 1970s, our findings are also incompatible with the earlier conventional wisdom associated with researchers at the University of Michigan. The latter difference is less conspicuous because Independents did not occupy such a prominent place in their work. It should be emphasized, however, that none of our findings describes a recent development. With one exception, everything that we say about different types of Independents was as true in the 1950s as it is today. The only difference is the lower level of interest and participation by the genuine Independents, those who deny that they are closer to one party or the other.

A jaundiced view of political parties is part of our most distinguished intellectual heritage. Parties were, after all, among the most unattractive of those "factions" that the Founding

Raymond E. Wolfinger, Martin Shapiro, and Fred I. Greenstein, Dynamics of American Politics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 133, 151.

Keith et al., "The Myth of the Independent Voter," paper delivered at the 1977 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Fathers so roundly deplored.11 Long after parties had become an essential component of the American political system, they were still regarded with suspicion by acute and influential observers. For example, Lord Bryce's model citizen

will give close and constant attention to public affairs, recognizing that this is his interest as well as his duty. He will try to comprehend the main issues of policy, bringing to them an independent and impartial mind, which thinks first not of his own, but of the general interest. . . . If, owing to inevitable differences of opinion as to what are the measures needed for the general welfare, parties become inevitable, he will join one, and attend its meetings, but will repress the impulses of party spirit. Never failing to come to the polls, he will vote for his party candidate only if satisfied by his capacity and honesty.12

Bryce was not alone in urging Americans to keep their distance from parties if they had the astuteness and strength of character to do so. This was the outlook in an 1891 high school civics text:

As on the playground, some do not care always to go with the crowd, or even prefer to be by themselves. Such as these, who think for themselves, and dare to stand alone, make the Independents in politics.

They are likely to prefer the good of their country to the success of their party. They will not act with their party, or will leave it, if it is wrong. If the other party changes, as parties sometimes change, and advocates measures that they believe in; if they change their own minds as sensible men sometimes must; or if the other party puts forward better candidates; or if a new party

See Austin Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction: Party Reform in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 2257.

James Bryce, Modern Democracies , vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 4748.

arises, the independent voters are willing to act wherever they believe they can best secure the public welfare.13

In short, partisanship had its place, but it was no substitute for the voter's independence of thought and action.

Other students of politics thought that it was up to Independents to rescue the parties:

If the politicians must look after the parties, there should be somebody to look after the politicians, somebody to ask disagreeable questions and to utter uncomfortable truths; somebody to make sure, if possible, before election, not only what but whom the candidate, if elected, is going to represent. . . . The old parties are not to be reformed from within. It is from without that the attempt must be made, and it is the Independents who must make it. If the attempt should fail, the failure of the experiment of democracy would inevitably follow.14

More recently, serious students of politics came to prize parties as an essential part of the polity:

The political parties created democracy and . . . modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties. . . . The parties are not therefore merely appendages of modern government; they are in the center of it and play a determinative and creative role in it.15

Few contemporary political scientists would challenge this view, but most Americans share the Founding Fathers' distaste. In the fall of 1974, in the immediate aftermath of Watergatea scandal to which neither party contributed72 percent of the American public said that the parties were

Charles F. Dole, The New American Citizen (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1891), 127.

James Russell Lowell, "The Place of Independents in Politics," in J. R. Lowell, Political Essays (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888), 318.

E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942), 1.

the part of the government they "least often trust to do what's right." A mere 13 percent mentioned the president in this connection.16

The fundamental explanation for the parties' unpopularity seems to be a belief that they stir up conflict. Jack Dennis, the leading student of the parties' public image, reported that nearly two-thirds of those interviewed agreed that "the political parties more often than not create conflicts where none really exists." Fifty-three percent thought that "our system of government would work a lot more efficiently if we could get rid of conflicts between the parties altogether."17 In 1980, 56 percent of all NES respondents agreed that "the parties do more to confuse the issues than to provide a clear choice on issues," and just 24 percent dissented from this verdict. Half the sample went so far as to agree that "it would be better if, in all elections, we put no party labels on the ballot."18

In view of such sentiments, it is not surprising that the vast majority of Americans deny that a candidate's party is important and insist that they vote for the best candidate, irrespective of party. A month before the 1986 elections, less than 10 percent of registered voters said that the biggest factor in their vote decision would be the candidate's political party.19

If party affiliation really influenced the votes of so few people, it would not be the keystone of most efforts in the past thirty-five years to understand voting behavior. We will see that despite their expressions of distaste for the parties, most

Unattributed statements about voting and public opinion are based on our analysis of National Election Studies (NES) data. The multi-year tables throughout this book are based when possible on the NES 19521988 Cumulative Data File.

Jack Dennis, "Support for the Party System by the Mass Public," American Political Science Review 60 (September 1966): 605. See also Dennis, "Public Support for the Party System, 19641984," paper delivered at the 1986 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

This item has not been asked of NES respondents since 1980.

CBS NewsNew York Times poll release dated October 6, 1986. Nearly three-quarters of the votes cast in the 1986 House elections were along party lines.

Americans are powerfully affected by their affiliations with the Democratic or Republican party.

Affiliation with a party can be defined in various ways: legal voter registration, formal "card-carrying" membership, or personal identification. The first of these alternatives is a function of state laws, which vary enormously. In some states there is no registration by party; in others, membership is achieved simply by claiming to be a Democrat or Republican when voting in that party's primary. This diversity makes it impossible to use legal registration as the basis of a nationally uniform definition of party membership. The drawback of the second definition, formal membership in an organization, is its rarity; less than 4 percent of all Americans belong to a party in this sense. The third and most useful manifestation of partisanship is party identification, a subjective identification as a Republican or Democrat.

Reporting their analysis of nationwide surveys in 1952 and 1956, four social scientists at the University of Michigan described party identification as the most stable and important determinant of individual voting decisions and the point of departure for analysis of many aspects of public opinion:

Few factors are of greater importance for our national elections than the lasting attachment of tens of millions of Americans to one of the parties. These loyalties establish a basic division of electoral strength within which the competition of particular campaigns takes place. And they are an important factor in assuring the stability of the party system itself. . . . Most Americans have this sense of attachment with one party or the other. And for the individual who does, the strength and direction of party identification are facts of central importance in accounting for attitude and behavior.20

Angus Campbell et al., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), 121.

The Michigan researchers were not the first to assert that many Americans have durable commitments to a political party. This idea had long been a staple of political commentary and was an important element in the work of such influential scholars as V.O. Key, Jr.21 But they were the first visible academic survey researchers to identify Republicans and Democrats in other than election-specific terms. Earlier researchers had assigned respondents to a party on the basis of their voting intentions in the impending presidential election.22 The Michigan contribution in this respect was an operational measure of partisan commitment that was consistent with the previous understanding of this concept, as represented in the work of scholars like Key.

If party identification were identical to vote choice, it would be an unnecessary term; if it were unrelated to vote choice, it would be without explanatory value. The crux of the concept is that it is antecedent to, distinct from, and influential of individual voting decisions. By conceiving of party identification as an affective attachment, the Michigan scholars made it possible to understand electoral decisions as the interplay of historical forces and such contemporary factors as candidate appeal, disputes about policies, and evaluations of governmental performance.

Few analysts dispute the brilliant simplification involved in the initial Michigan approach, that voting is affected both by long-term predispositions and by short-term cues. Predispositions continue to be much the same from election to election and can be invoked to account for the

An especially interesting example is V.O. Key, Jr., and Frank Munger, "Social Determinism and Electoral Decision," in American Voting Behavior , ed. Eugene Burdick and Arthur J. Brodbeck (New York: Free Press, 1959).

Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 2526. The Gallup Poll began asking about party identification as early as 1937. See Everett Carll Ladd, "Party Identification: The Idea and Its Measure," The Public Perspective 2 (May/June 1991): 17.

substantial numbers of electors who always vote for the same party.23

An "affective orientation to an important group-object,"24 party identification was an enduring aspect of the individual's political outlook. It imparted stability, a certain degree of predictability, to elections. Committed partisansmost of the publicwere less receptive to candidates appealing to election-year passions. This was nicely illustrated by the pattern of support in 1968 for the third-party presidential candidacy of George C. Wallace, which was based largely on Wallace's hostility to civil-rights laws. These measures were most popular among the young, but so was Wallace, who "captured less than 3 percent of the vote among people over seventy outside the South, but 13 percent of those under thirty, with a regular gradient connecting these two extremes."25 The explanation for this apparent inconsistency was the strong relationship between age and strength of party attachment. Younger voters, less anchored by party identification, were more vulnerable to Wallace's appeal.

One can easily understand why party identification was not only "the key concept of U.S. electoral research"26 but also of great interest to a broader scholarly constituency:

In the course of a mere two decades, party identification has become as pervasive a concept as power, authority, legitimacy, stability, or any other element in the professional political scientist's vocabulary. . . . It offers a

Ian Budge, Ivor Crewe, and Dennis Farlie, "Introduction: Party Identification and Beyond," in Party Identification and Beyond , ed. Budge, Crewe, and Farlie (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1976), 18.

Campbell et al., The American Voter , 121.

Philip E. Converse et al., "Continuity and Change in American Politics: Parties and Issues in the 1968 Election," American Political Science Review 63 (December 1969): 1103.

Michael B. MacKuen, Robert S. Erikson, and James A. Stimson, "Macropartisanship," American Political Science Review 83 (December 1989): 1125.

new explanation of democratic stability and legitimacy, which in turn confer authority and power. The more electors are attached by enduring psychological links to political parties, the argument runs, the more the polity is insured against . . . sudden demagogic incursions.27

For more than a generation, social scientists have been identifying Democrats, Republicans, and Independents by asking respondents to apply one of these labels to themselves. The NES uses this question:28

Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?

If the respondent answers "Republican" or "Democrat," the interviewer follows up with

Would you call yourself a strong Republican [Democrat] or a not very strong Republican [Democrat]?

If the respondent answers "Independent," the interviewer probes:

Budge, Crewe, and Farlie, "Introduction," in Party Identification , 3.

The NES questions are often used in other academic surveys and by media and political pollsters. The wording ("Generally speaking, do you usually . . .") was designed to encourage respondents to look beyond the immediate present. This contrasts with the Gallup organization's question, which emphasizes the here and now: "In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an Independent?" Compared to the Gallup measure, responses to the NES question vary much less over time and are considerably less responsive to economic conditions and assessments of presidential performance. See Paul R. Abramson and Charles W. Ostrom, Jr., "Macropartisanship: An Empirical Reassessment," American Political Science Review 85 (March 1991): 13847.

Gallup seldom uses a probe that permits identification of partisan Independents. For a thoroughgoing review of responses to Gallup questions on party affiliation, see Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., "Declarations of Independents," Public Opinion , AprilMay 1984, 2132.

Do you think of yourself as closer to the Republican party or to the Democratic party?

Nearly two-thirds of those who initially label themselves Independents concede that they are closer to one or the other party. These are the "leaners," "partisan Independents," or "Independent Republicans" and "Independent Democrats." "Pure Independents" are those who continue to deny any partisan inclinations when asked about closeness to a party. Together with the Strong and Weak ("not so strong") Republicans and Democrats, the NES questions provide seven categories of party identification:29

Strong Democrat
Weak Democrat
Independent Democrat
Pure Independent
Independent Republican
Weak Republican
Strong Republican

The full time series from 1952 through 1990, with all seven party identification categories, is in table 1.1.

One obvious decision in any data analysis using the Michigan party identification questions is how to treat respondents who call themselves Independents. Should their initial label be honored? This would create an inclusive category comparable in size to either party's adherents. Or should attention be paid to their response to the probe about closeness to a party? This would produce a small Pure Independent category, less than one respondent in six.

This problem was not mentioned in The American Voter 's discussion of measuring party identification, except perhaps for the observation that "by treating Independents as a single

Once in a while someone identifies with a minor party and a handful of people manifest no interest in parties or politics. These apolitical respondents are discussed in chapters 2 and 9 and will be excluded from data analyses after chapter 2.

group we may reduce seven categories to five."30 The emphasis was on party identification as "a continuum of partisanship extending from strongly Republican to strongly Democratic." 31 In his article "The Concept of a Normal Vote," Philip E. Converse said that the seven categories of party identification "are often collapsed, as in this article, to five or three classes, in response to needs for greater numbers per class, or under certain circumstances to assure monotonicity " (emphasis added).32

The authors of The American Voter opted to aggregate all Independents for purposes of analysis, setting a precedent that was almost universally observed for nearly twenty years.33 Independents were the midpoint on a continuum running from Strong Democrats and Weak Democrats to Weak and

Campbell et al., The American Voter , 123.

Ibid., 12223.

Converse, "The Concept of a Normal Vote," 20n.

The exceptions to this generalization in the three seminal books by the scholars who conducted the first Michigan studies are sparse enough to be enumerated in one note. The first book from Michigan contained several tables based on the seven-way classification but did not acknowledge in the text that Democratic leaners were more loyal to the Democratic presidential candidate than Weak Democrats or the same pattern on the Republican side. See Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren E. Miller, The Voter Decides (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1954), 101, 1089.

This evident lack of interest in differentiating leaners and Pure Independents continued in The American Voter , which presented a great many data analyses that combined all varieties of Independents and just seven tables where they were not combined (pp. 124, 125, 126, 134, 148, 201, 390). Only the tables on pp. 125, 126, and 148 bear on the controversy about how to classify leaners. All three tables show leaners less willing than weak partisans to report a personal history of party regularity. (We discuss this substantive topic and the validity of such retrospective data in chapter 5.)

The single seven-way table in Elections and the Political Order (p. 218) concerns one of the few variables that always has a monotonic relationship to strength of party identification: respondents' reports about the partisan consistency of their past voting choices. The same finding appears on p. 125 of The American Voter . Another table in Elections and the Political Order (p. 197) included leaners with strong and weak partisans in a three-way distribution.

Strong Republicans. Once all three kinds of Independents were in one category, strength of partisanship was positively associated with turnout and other measures of civic virtue, including interest in the campaign and concern about its outcome. The relationship was U-shaped, with Independents at a low point between the partisans of each party. By the same token, the relationship of this five-point measure to vote choice was monotonic. Strong Democrats were most likely to vote for their party's candidate, Weak Democrats less so, then Independents, and so on to the Strong Republicans at the opposite end of the party identification scale.

In sharp contrast to the pre-survey-research view of Independents, The American Voter found them ignorant, apathetic, and inactive.34 Other than impugning their civic virtue, The American Voter had little to say about Independents. They were the midpoint on a continuum; their beliefs and behavior were interesting chiefly as a basis of comparison with people of varying degrees of partisan affiliation.

This picture of partisans and Independents became the unchallenged conventional wisdom until the late 1960s when large increases in the number of Independents raised new questions. Although this development led some scholars to characterize Independents in new ways, for some years no one challenged the five-category and three-category scales of party identification that treated Independents as a single group.

In the next few pages we will examine some of the implications that observers of the American political scene have found in the growing number of Independents. Many of these fairly portentous conclusions are associated with explicit rejections of a view of individual political behavior that their authors attribute to The American Voter . But both these revi-

Campbell et al., The American Voter , 14344.

sionists and the objects of their criticism generally shared the analytic mistake that gave rise to this book: They combined all three kinds of Independents in analyzing data, or they assumed that this combination was appropriate.

We begin with the simple three-way distribution of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents that is commonly used to demonstrate the trend. As fig. 1.1 shows, Independents out-numbered Republicans as early as 1966, became more than a third of the sample in 1972, and first came within two percentage points of the Democrats in 1974. By the end of the 1980s Independents and Democrats had equal proportions of the sample.

The decline of the political parties has of course been a staple item in descriptions of the American political scene for most of this century. In the words of one believer, it is "a frequent refrain among experts in American political parties."35 The growth in Independents has become an important exhibit in discussion of this putative trend.36 "While claiming to be an Independent does not necessarily signify a positive commitment to 'Independence,' as a principle, it does reveal a lack of commitment to either of the major parties."37

The implications of fewer committed adherents are explicated in this passage from H. G. Nicholas's recent interpretation of American politics:

Indeed one of the most conspicuous features of the contemporary electorate is the growing proportion

Howard L. Reiter, Parties and Elections in Corporate America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 36.

See Leon D. Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 4, 240; Nicholas Henry, Governing at the Grassroots , 3d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 11112; James L. Gibson et al., "Whither the Local Parties? A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analysis of the Strength of Party Organization," American Journal of Political Science 29 (February 1985): 13940.

Paul R. Abramson, John H. Aldrich, and David W. Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 1980 Elections , rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1983), 240.

Figure 1.1
Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in the United States, 19521990

upwards of 30 percentwhich has developed an indifference to party and describes itself as 'Independent.' As such it is unavailable for the day-to-day business of politics, the canvassing, the drumming up of interest in the minor offices, the attendance at meetings, the raising of fundsin short, the maintenance of the structure of participatory politics.38

Some writers think that the trend toward more Independents portends not just weaker parties but the end of the party system.39 One respected scholar has suggested that "if the decline of partisan politics continues, . . . the loss will be that of democracy."40

If the proportion of Americans who could be affected by party affiliation was shrinking, it seemed likely that another consequence of the trend would be greater electoral volatility:

Independents operate under no such constraints [as party loyalty]. By definition, their vote (and, for that matter, whether they choose to vote at all) is not anchored by party ties. . . . It is an unstable vote (and turnout) that is basically unpredictable over time, and introduces into elections an increased volatility that today's fluid politics do not need. . . . The independent vote is up for grabs. It has no allegiances. Its volatility and malleability does [sic ] little to ease the concern of those who value stability and order in American politics.41

One casualty of this increased volatility might be effective government. In the opinion of Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., "The

H. G. Nicholas, The Nature of American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 57.

Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 13134.

Gerald M. Pomper, "The Decline of the Party in American Elections," Political Science Quarterly 92 (Spring 1977): 41.

William J. Crotty, American Parties in Decline , 2d ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 37. For the same diagnosis of "much wider swings from one election to the next" from a scholar whose political perspective differs from Crotty's, see John H. Kessel, Presidential Campaign Politics , 2d ed. (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1984), 279.

fact that a very large proportion of the electorate has been cut loose from relatively stable party ties and has been left free to float necessarily compounds the fragility of the mandate that a modern president enjoys."42 Hedrick Smith draws a similar conclusion: "This free-floating independence of voters has encouraged the individualism of a new breed of politicians. Since the party brand name lacks the old punch, some candidates run away from their party label when it suits them." Smith goes on to assert that this new breed of politicians with "highly independent campaign styles" is in turn less responsible to party leaders in Congress.43

Some writers go beyond characterizing Independents as volatile and see them as something of a bloc.44 The authors of one textbook observe that "in a strong sense, independents are one of the two major parties."45 Well-known specialists in voting behavior say that "the large portion of the electorate, mostly young, who have no party ties remains available to

Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., Where Have All the Voters Gone? 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 77.

Smith, The Power Game , 685, 686.

A list of other scholars who combine the three types of Independents for analysis would include Robert C. Luskin, John P. McIver, and Edward G. Carmines, "Issues and the Transmission of Partisanship," American Journal of Political Science 33 (May 1989): 444; Carole J. Uhlaner, "Rational Turnout: The Neglected Role of Groups," American Journal of Political Science 33 (May 1989): 417; Helmut Norpoth, "Under Way and Here to Stay: Party Realignment in the 1980s?" Public Opinion Quarterly 51 (Fall 1987): 38586; Lee Sigelman et al., "Voting and Nonvoting: A Multi-Election Perspective," American Journal of Political Science 29 (November 1985): 757; Charles H. Franklin, "Issue Preferences, Socialization, and the Evolution of Party Identification," American Journal of Political Science 28 (August 1984): 469; and Stanley Feldman and Pamela Johnston Conover, "Candidates, Issues, and Voters: The Role of Inference in Political Perception," Journal of Politics 45 (November 1983): 824.

Kenneth S. Sherrill and David J. Vogler, Power, Policy and Participation (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 317. Sherrill and Vogler also think that "we may be witnessing the disarray and deterioration of both parties" (emphasis in original) (p. 282).

attach itself to a new party coalition"46 Others think the beneficiaries of this big new bloc of potential supporters might not be limited to the existing two parties. Bruce A. Campbell wrote that one result of the increase in Independents "is the advantage that large numbers of Independents present to third parties. . . . The feeling lingers that sooner or later those Independents will find a cause around which they can rally."47 A few years later, Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde took the same line: "The great hope of third parties is the large percentage of the electorate (roughly one-third) who claim to have no party ties."48

The trend toward independence is believed by some political scientists to be the first step toward partisan realignment, that is, one or more changes in the profile of identifiers with the two parties. At the least, more Independents make such a reshuffling of party affiliations more feasible: "Since the mid-1960s, the uncommitted share of the electorate has increased throughout the nation, thus raising the possibilities for realignment."49 By the mid-1980s, a historically significant realignment appeared imminent to William Schneider:

The Democrats are no longer the nation's normal majority party. That was the big political news of 1984. The big question for 1985 is whether the Republicans can take their place. One-third of all Americans call themselves Republicans, one-third call themselves Democrats and

Kenneth Prewitt, Sidney Verba, and Robert H. Salisbury, Introduction to American Government , 5th ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 359.

Bruce A. Campbell, The American Electorate (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 268.

Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde, Change and Continuity , 237.

Paul Allen Beck, "Realignment Begins? The Republican Surge in Florida," paper delivered at the 1981 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 14; see also Martin P. Wattenberg, "The Hollow Realignment: Partisan Change in a Candidate-Centered Era," Public Opinion Quarterly 51 (Spring 1987): 5874.

the remaining third are Independents. Is this the long-awaited realignment of American politics?50

A more popular interpretation of the trend, however, or a more popular label for it, is "dealignment":

The present alignment is accompanied, indeed distinguished, by the continued weakening of voter loyalties to political parties in general. I erred four years ago when I argued that the question was whether a realignment or a dealignment was occurring. The larger change in voter alignments we are experiencing includes a greater reluctance on the part of many voters to express any underlying party preference, and an increased willingness to leave the candidate of their professed party with little hesitancy. In general party indentification is a more casual matter than it ever before has been.51

The dealignment thesis, which is based on an assumed diminution of the importance of partisanship in voting, is often asserted without support.52 Advocates of the thesis are among the best-known students of public opinion and voting in America. William Schneider has called it "a major change in American politics."53 Paul Allen Beck sees the evidence of dealignment as "undeniable."54 Even Paul Kirk, former chairman of

William Schneider, "Demos No Longer the Majority Party," Los Angeles Times , December 30, 1984, pt. IV, 12.

Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., "As the Realignment Turns: A Drama in Many Acts," Public Opinion , December 1984January 1985, 6.

James E. Campbell and Joe A. Sumners, "Presidential Coattails in Senate Elections," American Political Science Review 84 (June 1990): 513, 520, 521; Edward G. Carmines, John P. McIver, and James A. Stimson, "Unrealized Partisanship: A Theory of Dealignment," Journal of Politics 49 (May 1987): 376400.

William Schneider, "Antipartisanship in America," in Parties and Democracy in Britain and America , ed. Vernon Bogdanor (New York: Praeger, 1984), 100.

Paul Allen Beck, "Incomplete Realignment: The Reagan Legacy for Parties and Elections," in The Reagan Legacy: Promise and Performance , ed. Charles O. Jones (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1988), 165.

the Democratic National Committee, has claimed that "realignment is a myth but so-called dealignment is a reality."55

Political observers have not been bashful about discerning significance in the apparent diminished importance of party identification. In a few years, Independents were transformed from the forgotten respondents in The American Voter into the central characters in a series of melodramatic scenarios about contemporary American politics: electoral volatility, the decline of the parties, the loss of governmental authority, the end of the current party system, the birth of third parties, realignment, and dealignment. Any or all of these notions may be vindicated by events, but it is important to understand that as of 1991, trends in responses to the NES questions about party identification have not provided much supporting evidence. This is true because researchers who combine all three kinds of Independents when analyzing these data are making a crucial mistake. Most respondents who answer the first NES question by calling themselves Independents are no such thing; as the follow-up question lets us discover, they are covert partisans. Therefore, virtually no generalizations about broadly defined "Independents" are correct. Since the interpretations cited in the previous section are based on this mistaken operational definition of Independents, they are wrong. What is true of the revisionist work of the 1970s and 1980s applies equally to the earlier conventional wisdom based on the Michigan trilogy.56

Some early work about the growth of Independents con-

Paul Kirk at the conference "Picking the President: Is There a Better Way?" sponsored by the Public Policy Program and the Department of Government, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, November 10, 1989.

Campbell, Gurin, and Miller, The Voter Decides; Campbell et al., The American Voter; Campbell et al., Elections and the Political Order .

cluded that it reflected in large measure the Southern shift away from the Democratic party that began in response to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Barry Goldwater's explicit appeal to the South in the election that fall. At the same time, blacks seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from other Americans, becoming more, not less, identified with a party. In chapter 2 we examine regional and racial trends in party identification to ascertain the extent to which blacks and white Southerners differed from the rest of the country.

In the era before survey research, independence was the mark of the ideal citizen. As we have seen, this picture was shattered by The American Voter . One part of the revisionist argument challenged this new conventional wisdom, arguing that there were now "two kinds of Independents," one of which was characterized by civic virtue. Chapter 3 shows that neither of these formulations is satisfactory. There are indeed two kinds of Independents: leaners and Pure Independents.

Chapter 4 describes the voting choices of Independents in presidential and congressional elections. It shows that leaners vote very much like the outright partisans of the parties toward which they incline. This finding persuaded many observers that leaners were indeed partisans. Other scholars, however, developed arguments that explained how leaners could vote as they did and still be considered Independents. Chapter 5 deals with this round of responses to our earlier work by examining leaners' participation in presidential primaries, the durability of their party identification, and their views of the two parties.

In chapter 6 we examine the distribution of party identification among people of different ages and educational attainment to test various propositions about the appeal of the parties to different generations and educational groups.

Other, related explanations for the growth of Independents concern the divisive political issues that confronted Americans from 1966 to 1972: Vietnam and race relations. These are the topics of chapter 7. One of the presumed consequences of

this pair of issues was widespread disaffection with existing political institutions. In chapter 8, therefore, we examine relations between this phenomenon and party identification.

In chapter 9 we consider two other attempts to explain Independents: that they dislike parties as institutions and that party identification is really a multidimensional phenomenon that was not adequately measured by the Michigan questions. Finally, in chapter 10 we summarize what we have found and examine the implications for diagnoses of the contemporary American political scene.

Excerpted from The Myth of the Independent Voterby Bruce E. Keith Copyright © 1992 by Bruce E. Keith. Excerpted by permission.
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