The Voter Decides
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The Voter Decides is a political science book by Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren E. Miller. It first developed the notion of "Party Identification" or, in abbreviated form, "Party ID." Party ID is the sense of personal attachment the individual feels toward the political group or party of his or her choice.
The Voter Decides developed three theories as to how a person acquires Party ID. 1) Party attachment, like church preference, may be passed down from parent to child. 2)It may be the case that people remain in the same class, ethnic and religious groups as their parents and are subject to the same group influences as their parents. 3) People may tend to consciously or otherwise make the memory of their parent's partisanship conform to their own attachments
In short, once a Party ID is acquired from a person's parents (through unknowing absorption from a very young age) the person spends the rest of their life adopting views and positions that create a reason for their party affiliation.
There is not a strong link between participation and party ID. Identifying oneself as a Democrat or Republican does not make a person more or less likely to participate in the political process through voting.
No single theory will account for voting behavior. Scholars assume that most citizens acted upon more than Party ID in their vote choice. For example, in the 1952 US Presidential election Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, popularly known as Ike, ran against Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson I. Eisenhower's win was possible because many Democrats defected from their traditional party(i.e. the Democratic party) and voted for Ike. In the next, election however, there is much evidence that they returned to voting consistently Democratic. It was not a change in Party ID, but a vote choice based on the candidate (Ike was a popular WWII general).
