MEASURING LEVELS OF PARTY IDENTIFICATION DOES QUESTION ORDER MATTER?

Abstract

This article examines whether asking the vote question before party identification alters the strength of partisanship and its relationship to vote choice. It employs the 1992 British Election Survey, which included a random split half-sample experiment, and the 1992–93 American Election Study Panel, where the question order for party identification and the vote were changed. The results show that altering the question ordering had very little effect in Britain and no significant effect in the United States. These results are consistent with the notion that party identification is one of the more enduring and stable components of mass political behavior in both presidential and parliamentary systems.