Does a partisan public increase democratic stability?
Philip Converse argued that partisanship was itself a stable attribute over time, with parental socialization the key mechanism of transmission and source of stability. He implied that stability in partisanship was an important source of stability in democracy, a source based in the public rather than among elites. In this chapter, the authors re-examine Converse’s account with 50 years of additional data. We first use the Jennings and Niemi long-term panel to estimate parental transmission directly. They then use CSES data to estimate Converse’s full model, with special attention to the time paths of party development in former Soviet bloc nations, compared to longer-standing democracies. Finally, they use those data to examine the relationship between partisanship and satisfaction with the workings of democracy. The results are generally supportive of Converse’s original claims and, further, provide a key step forward in assessing the role of the public in stabilizing democracies.
