Party attachments and state election laws

This article examines the influence that state party registration laws have on individual-level party attachments. It tests the hypothesis that indivi duals living in states with party registration laws are more likely than th ose living in states without such laws to identify themselves as partisans. This occurs primarily because of self-perception processes by which regist rants infer their party attitudes from their own behaviors. Using the state -based Senate Election Study data to test this expectation, we find strong evidence for both statistically and substantively significant effects of pa rty registration on individual partisanship. Registered individuals living in states with party registration are, by about ten percentage points, more likely to identify as partisans than those in other states even when contr olling for alternative hypotheses dealing with state culture, attitudes tow ard the parties, retrospective evaluations, interest in politics, and demog raphic factors. Importantly the effect is not observed for individuals who are not registered to vote but is for registered nonvoters. However, regist ration-induced party identification is shallow as individuals living in reg istration states are also more likely to vote for candidates from the other party.