THE STABILITY OF PARTY IDENTIFICATION IN WESTERN DEMOCRACIES - RESULTS FROM 8 PANEL SURVEYS

The concept of party identification is widely thought to be of limited utility outside the United States, where partisan attachments are reg arded as unstable. The authors argue that estimating the stability of party identification outside the United States requires attention to p roblems of dimensionality and measurement error The authors develop a model for estimating the stability of partisanship that addresses thes e problems, and they apply the model to eight panel surveys drawn from Great Britain, Canada, and Germany. The results suggest that partisan ship has been extremely stable in each country, with the exception of recent developments in Canada. The model and findings presented here s uggest the need for refinement in the way partisanship is measured, an d partisan stability assessed, in multiparty systems.