How Educational Attainment Moderates the Recursive Relationship Between Policy Orientations and Partisanship

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231157267
• Author: Joshua N. Zingher
• Date: 01 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(4) 480–491

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231157267

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How Educational Attainment Moderates the

Recursive Relationship Between Policy

Orientations and Partisanship

Joshua N. Zingher

1



Abstract

Partisanship and policy attitudes are two foundational political dispositions. While scholars recognize both as important,

there is a longstanding debate about how these dispositions inf‌luence each other. One camp argues that partisanship

shapes policy attitudes much more strongly than the reverse, the other claims policy attitudes exert a powerful inf‌luence

on partisanship. In this paper, I take up this debate and test these claims. I assess whether individuals bring their

partisanship in line with their policy orientationswithananalysisof14ANESandGSS panels. The highly edu cated have

more stable attitudes and are more likely to bring their partisanship and policy attitudes in line with each other. The

relationship is weaker among those with only a high school diploma. These results show that policy attitudes exert an

underappreciated inf‌luence on partisanship. Overall, I f‌ind the policy orientations shape partisanship at least as much as

the reverse.

Keywords

partisanship, policy orientations, panel analysis, education

People identify with political parties. Partisan identif‌ications are

often strong. People also have attitudes about the proper di-

rection of government policy, though scholars debate just how

widely held and inf‌luential these attitudes are. Professional

students of public opinion agree on these facts. However, be-

yond this narrow set of facts, the consensus breaks down. Some

scholars view policy attitudes and other core values as powerful

predictors of political behavior and even partisanship (Goren &

Chapp, 2017;Lupton & McKee, 2020;Satherley et al., 2020).

Others regard partisanship as the key mover and regard policy

attitudes, to the extent they matter at all, as ref‌lections of par-

tisanship rather than meaningful standalone dispositions

(Converse, 1964;Lenz, 2013;Achen & Bartels, 2016;Kinder &

Kalmoe, 2017;Freeder et al., 2019;Barber & Pope, 2019). Still,

some argue that the relative importance of partisanship and

policy orientations vary as a function of sophistication—the

highly sophisticated minority relieson policy attitudes while the

less sophisticated majority does not (Zaller, 1992;Carsey &

Layman, 2006). Others dispute this claim and argue individuals

across sophistication levels hold policy orientations (Feldman,

1998;Goren, 2004,2013;Hurwitz & Peff‌ley, 1987;Zingher &

Flynn, 2019). Overall, there is disagreement about the nature of

the interrelationships between partisanship and policy attitudes

and whether they vary as a function of sophistication.

In this paper, I bring evidence to bear to test these

competing visions of American public opinion. There are two

core questions that I seek to answer. First, what are the in-

terrelationships between policy orientations and partisanship?

Does one shape the other but not the reverse? Or do they

jointly shape each other? Second, does political sophistica-

tion moderate these interrelationships? Are the politically

sophisticated more apt to see the connections between policy

and party and update one or the other in the face of conf‌licts?

Or is this something most or all citizens do? I rely on repeated

panel data from the General Social Survey (GSS) and the

American National Election Study (ANES) to answer these

questions. These data track the same respondents over time.

The data’s repeated nature allows me to assess how policy

orientations and partisanship inf‌luence each other over sev-

eral years. In total, I include 14 separate panels that span three

decades. Across most panels, I f‌ind policy orientations and

partisanship jointly shape each other. However, policy ori-

entations shape partisanship at least as much as the reverse, if

1

Department of Political Science and Geography, Old Dominion University,

Norfolk, VA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Joshua N. Zingher, Political Science and Geography, Old Dominion

University, 7000 Batten Arts and Letters, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA.

Email: jzingher@odu.edu