Across Western industrialized democracies, scholars have found voters to become dealigned from political parties over the past few decades. The decrease of party identification and what has caused this process has already received quite some attention, but the debate is still on-going.
More specifically, there is disagreement on the link between party dealignment and a concurrent process of cognitive mobilization. While originally dealigned voters were thought of as uninterested in politics, Dalton (1984: 2013) suggests that in the current electorate there is a substantial group of sophisticated apartisans.
This individual-level research, however, is confined by the limited cross-country traveling capacity of the concept of party identification (Thomassen and Rosema, 2009). Especially within a multiparty context, party identification is found to resemble vote choice almost perfectly. As a consequence, the validity of the concept of party identification is questioned and its usefulness varies strongly from one country to another.
Given these methodological and conceptual problems, in this paper we propose a different operationalization of voters’ party attachment. Relying on the cumulative file of European Election Survey data (1984-2009), we use information on voters’ propensities to vote for different parties to construct a measure of party attachment. Therefore, we use the kurtosis from the distribution of individual voters’ PTV-scores for different parties (sorted on a left-right axis). This measure of ‘peakedness’ can be used as an indicator of how attached voters’ are to a particular party compared to other political parties.
Given the process of dealignment we expect the ‘peakedness’ of voters’ PTV-distribution to decrease over time. Furthermore, we assume that a process of generational change is of foremost importance in this transformation. The use of the EES data makes it possible to validate earlier individual-level findings on the link between political sophistication and partisanship in a comparative manner.
