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Race, Republicans, & the Return of the Party of Lincoln
By Tasha S. Philpot The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2007 University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-09967-2
Chapter One
Toward a Theory of Party Image Change
While the importance and study of party identification has been duly noted, the study of party images-individuals' perceptions or stereotypes of political parties-has received significantly less attention. Based on the extant literature, we know the contents of party image (Matthews and Prothro 1964; Trilling 1976; Sanders 1988) and the impact of party image on candidate evaluation (Rahn 1993). Less explored are the conditions under which individuals' party images can be altered. Studies (e.g., B. Campbell 1977; Carmines and Stimson 1989) have observed changes in party behavior and attempted to link them to similar changes in partisan alignment. Scholars, however, have not examined changes in party image at the individual level. More specifically, scholars have not incorporated party activities into models of party image change. As a result, we do not know which party strategies alter party images and what circumstances moderate the strategies' impact. This chapter seeks to develop a theoretical framework for understanding when party images can be reshaped. In particular, I answer the question of whether aesthetic changes unaccompanied by corresponding changes in policy positions canalter voters' perceptions of political parties along a particular dimension. I argue that a party will succeed in reshaping its image when voters perceive the new image as different from the old.
Party Images
Each of the two major parties is associated with political symbols-policies, candidates, and constituencies-that give meaning to these organizations for members of the U.S. electorate. Sears (2001) explains, "When presented to us, these political symbols rivet our attention and evoke strong emotion. These emotions are dominated by a simple good-bad, like-dislike evaluative dimension" (15). Since affective evaluations of the parties are a function of their symbolic components, political parties manipulate the symbols with which they are connected to gain favorable evaluations and ultimately electoral victory. Parties seek to manipulate not only which symbols get associated with their party but also the meaning individuals assign to these symbols.
The totality of the political symbols one associates with a political party is known as a party image. Party images form because at some point, political parties become synonymous with certain policy positions and groups in society. Petrocik (1996) suggests that
parties have sociologically distinctive constituencies and the linkage between a party's issue agenda and the social characteristics of its supporters is quite strong, even in the United States. It is a completely recursive linkage: groups support a party because it attempts to use government to alter or protect a social or economic status quo which harms or benefits them; the party promotes such policies because it draws supporters, activists, and candidates from the groups. Issue handling reputations emerge from this history, which, by the dynamics of political conflict, is regularly tested and reinforced. (828)
These reputations develop into an individual's party image (the "voter's picture of the party") and guide subsequent evaluations of a party (Matthews and Prothro 1964). Party image is not the same as party identification. While the two concepts are related, party image differs in that "two people may identify with the same party but have very different mental pictures of it and evaluate these pictures in different ways" (Matthews and Prothro 1964, 82). Trilling (1976) argues that "an individual's party image not surprisingly is likely to be related to his party identification, but his party image will consist less of purely psychological, affective components and more of substantive components" (2). Milne and MacKenzie (1955) describe party images as "symbols; the party is often supported because it is believed to stand for something dear to the elector. It matters little that the 'something' may be an issue no longer of topical importance; the attachment to the symbol, and the party, persists" (130). Symbols in this case denote not simply mascots and insignias but also candidates, issue positions, and historical events that exemplify a political party.
Each element can be categorized as either policy oriented or devoid of policy. For example, an individual can associate the Republican Party with issue positions such as opposition to affirmative action, opposition to big government, or support for capital punishment. Individuals can also link the Republican Party with more symbolic icons such as the GOP elephant, Ronald Reagan, Trent Lott, and George W. Bush. Likewise, the Democratic Party can be represented by the Democratic donkey, the Kennedys, or Jesse Jackson. Issue positions associated with the Democratic Party could include support for affirmative action or support for social spending. Thus, party image consists of all the substantive components a person associates with a given political party.
Moreover, party image incorporates the interpretation individuals assign to these components. According to Elder and Cobb (1983),
While a symbol references some aspect of reality external to the individual, precisely what is referenced is often unclear and varies from one person to another. When a person responds to a symbol, he is responding not simply to external reality but to his conception or interpretation of that reality. Thus, the meaning he gives to the symbol will be based on information and ideas he has stored away in his mind. To understand how symbols acquire meaning, we must inquire into the kinds of cognitive meanings that a person has available to assign to a symbol. (40-41)
In this sense, two individuals' party images can contain the same symbols but ultimately differ by the meaning these symbols signify. For example, two individuals can associate Trent Lott with the Republican Party but can reach different conclusions about where the Republican Party stands on race depending on whether they view Lott as racially conservative. Thus, party images are subjective and can vary across individuals. Regardless of interpretation, the symbols and the meaning assigned to them by an individual can potentially be used in evaluations of party activity. Consequently, evaluations of a party depend not only on what exists in an individual's party image but also on what is noticeably absent and how the individual makes sense of all this information.
Citizens develop their partisan images (also referred to as partisan stereotypes) through socialization and through (direct and indirect) encounters and experiences with party members (Rahn 1993). Information used to form party images can come from the parties themselves or from competing sources of political information such as the media or other political organizations. The information is filtered through the individual's political predispositions. Interactions with political parties shape not only the political symbols people associate with a given party but also the interpretation people lend to those symbols. Further, an individual's experiential knowledge also guides the affective weight he or she places on those political symbols. The affective valence and the salience of these symbols and the interpretation individuals assign to the symbols (i.e., the frames individuals use to make sense of the symbols) then guide party preferences.
Understanding party images is important because of the role these images play in the political process. Party images shape how individuals perceive political parties and can affect not only how people vote but also whether they choose to engage in the political process at all. As a result, party images can affect who wins and loses elections, which ultimately affects which interests are represented in the political arena.
It is no wonder, then, that political elites often attempt to reshape party images when seeking electoral success. After all, they must keep up with the changing face of the political landscape. First, the nature of political competition changes from election to election. Second, the electorate experiences demographic changes. Finally, issues rise and fall in importance. Thus, political parties must adapt to their changing environment. This includes altering the way different groups in the electorate perceive the political parties.
When attempting to reshape a party's image, however, political elites face a dilemma-they must attract new voters while maintaining their current support base. One way a political party might reshape its image is by adopting new issue positions. But as scholars note, doing so will likely upset current constituents and confuse potential voters. The alternative is to reshape the party's image in a more cosmetic way. Specifically, a party can use different representational images to convey to voters that the parties have changed without making any substantive changes to the party's platform. But does this strategy work?
Altering Party Images
While the party image literature does not currently address the question of what incites modifications in individuals' party images, we can glean some insight from research on party evaluations in political science and research on stereotypes in social psychology. If we consider a party image a form of stereotype, then social psychology research suggests that party images may be updated in the face of inconsistent information. Partisan stereotypes as well as stereotypes in general can be thought of as a schematic structure. A schema is a "a cognitive structure that organizes prior information and experience around a central value or idea, and guides the interpretation of new information and experience" (Zaller 1992, 37). Thus, schemata allow us to interpret what is ambiguous, uncertain, or unknown by applying it to a standing, known framework that exists in our heads. Schemata can be used in making inferences about events, other people, and ourselves. For example, when we encounter new people, we use either ascribed (e.g., age, race, sex) or achieved (e.g., experience or training) characteristics about that person to activate a set of role-based expectations about that person (Fiske and Taylor 1984). Fiske and Taylor (1984) assert that "one way to think about stereotypes is as a particular type of role schema that organizes one's prior knowledge and expectations about other people who fall into certain socially defined categories" (160). Political party stereotypes, then, would be "those cognitive structures that contain citizens' knowledge, beliefs, and expectancies about the two major political parties" (Rahn 1993, 474).
Accordingly, when an individual has associated an event, issue, or person with a particular stereotype, he or she then ascribes the stereotypic content to that situation, regardless of how much or how little the situation may actually resemble the stereotype (Fiske and Taylor 1984, 160). "The main principle of schematic memory is that the usual case overrides details of the specific instance" (Fiske and Taylor 1984, 162). For example, when individuals have identified a candidate as a Democrat, in the absence of additional information they will attribute all the features of what they imagine a Democrat to be to that candidate, regardless of whether that candidate is a moderate or ideologically at the extreme left.
When an individual receives new information, updating the stereotype depends on whether the newly presented information conflicts with existing knowledge. If the information presented in the stimulus is consistent with individuals' existing schematic information, they will encode that information and store it in their memory with the rest of the relevant considerations. Fiske and Taylor (1984) explain that "inconsistent behavior requires explanation, which takes time when the information is encountered-that is, at encoding. If people can attribute inconsistent behavior to situational causes, they can forget the behavior and presumably maintain their schema-based impression" (164).
This process of absorbing consistent information more readily than inconsistent information has a reinforcing effect on stereotypes in general (Fiske and Taylor 1984) as well as on partisan stereotypes in particular (Rahn 1993). Partisan stereotypes or images consequently are not easily altered because party images "are not created de novo" (Rapoport 1997, 188) each time voters receive new information about the parties as they would during a campaign. Current party images constitute the starting point from which new evaluations begin (Rapoport 1997, 188). Hence, when individuals encounter inconsistent information, they must weigh that information against all previously received information. In a sense, prior beliefs have an anchoring effect on how people encode new information.
This is not to say that party images or stereotypes cannot be altered. Rahn (1993) examined under what conditions people abandoned their use of party stereotypes when evaluating a candidate. Using an experimental design, Rahn tested to see whether people would incorporate policy information into their candidate evaluations when the policy information associated with a candidate was incongruent with the candidate's party affiliation. Rahn's results show that voters "neglect policy information in reaching evaluation; they use the label rather than policy attributes in drawing inferences; and they are perceptually less responsive to inconsistent information" (492). Furthermore, she found that even when voters faced extreme inconsistency, people still relied on their partisan stereotypes to make candidate evaluations. But at the same time, she admits that her results are not absolute. For example, Rahn speculates that voters may abandon their partisan stereotypes when the inconsistency is even more extreme or involves an issue that is particularly salient to the voter (487). In other words, stereotypes should break down when people can substitute an equally salient alternative means of categorization (Fiske and Taylor 1984; Hamilton and Sherman 1994).
If we consider party image a form of party evaluation, then the literature suggests that party images shift only when the parties switch positions in salient issue domains. The structure and dynamics of party evaluation have long been debated, with the debate centering on the question of whether party preference (usually measured by party identification) was fixed or malleable. Early studies (e.g., Downs 1957) modeled party preference as a function of an individual's issue positions relative to those of a party's position. This model assumed that voters updated their party preferences when they perceived changes in the platforms of a party or experienced changes in personal policy positions. In the Downsian sense, party evaluation was a continuous process. In contrast, party identification as conceptualized by A. Campbell et al. (1960) posited a view of party preference that was rooted in early childhood socialization and experienced very little alteration in later years. This perspective viewed party identification as a lot less malleable and more stable over time. In other words, party preference had very little to do with the evaluation of a party's activities but rather resulted from a psychological attachment to a party inherited from one's parents.
Subsequent studies have found that party preference lies somewhere between the two extremes. For example, Fiorina (1981) contends that while party identification is updated by changes in political factors, it is still ingrained in past policy preferences. Similarly, Jackson (1975) argues that "voting decisions are largely motivated by evaluations of where the parties are located on different issues relative to the persons' stated positions and to a much lesser extent by party identifications unless people are indifferent between the parties on issues" (183). Jackson contends that party preferences are "motivated by individuals' desires to have public policy reflect their own judgments about what policies should be followed and by the policies each party and its candidates advocate. Parties are important, but only if they constitute policy oriented, politically motivated organizations reflecting the distribution of positions among voters and competing for the support of the electorate" (183-84).
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Excerpted from Race, Republicans, & the Return of the Party of Lincoln by Tasha S. Philpot Copyright © 2007 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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