Ideological self-identification and party identification in Serbia

Abstract

In the political science literature, party identification is considered to be one of the main determinants of voting behaviour. In the classic Michigan model (Campbell et al., 1960), party identification is described as a sort of psychological affinity towards a political party, a stable and long-term orientation. It is assumed that party identification is acquired during the socialization process in the early years of one’s life as a form of social identity. Changes in party identification are considered to be relatively rare and caused by some major personal or societal events. Although there is no one-to-one relationship between party identification and voting, the probability that a person would vote for the party with which he/she is identified is highly likely. However, the standard model of party identification is not without its shortcomings in terms of comparative relevance. The essentially different nature of the political process in the two-party in comparison with the multiparty political system is but one example. Many argued that party identification is not simply a matter of affects, group identification and early socialization, and also not an unmoved mover as originally proposed. Some 60 scholars argue that party identification is a consequence of cumulative party performance evaluations (Fiorina, 1981). According to this view, party identification is a changeable, rational and political orientation; it is not the standard for political evaluations, but its consequence instead. Others propose that party identification is related to different aspects of political self-determination and ideological identification in a more general sense (Green et al., 2002). People know who they are, where they belong socially, which groups they (dis)like and which parties those groups support. In such a way, party identification is an amalgam of cognition and affects, a form of socially rooted self-identification.