Changing parties, changing partisans: the personalization of partisan attachments in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands

Abstract

"This paper investigates the effects of the deep transformations undergone by West European parties in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall fall on their relationship with the electorate. Attention is devoted in particular to the changing content of individuals' partisan attachments, which we hypothesize to have changed from a mere reflection of previous social and ideological identities to the result of individual attitudes towards parties and partisan objects. The main objective of this analysis is to show the nowadays prominent part played by voters' attitudes towards one of these 'objects' - party leaders - in determining psychological attachments with the parties. We concentrate on the main two cleavage-based parties in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands in the period between 1990 and the most recent election for which National Election Study data is available. By means of logistic regression analysis, it is shown the constantly declining ability of 'identity' items (e.g., social class, union membership, church attendance, region of residence) to predict individual feelings of partisan attachment, as well as the correspondingly growing part played by voters' attitudes towards issues, performance evaluation, and party leaders - the latter having become nowadays of crucial relevance in each country under analysis." (author's abstract)