Party Identification: Efficient Heuristic of Systematic Bias?

Using a new dataset that takes advantage of a novel survey design, I accomplish a joint estimation of citizens’ policy views and legislators’ ideal points on the same scale. I analyze several important questions about people’s preferences, perceptions and voting behavior using the case of the 2004 presidential election. In contrast to many earlier works, I show that most people do in fact have some level of policy ideology that has an important effect on their voting behavior. The influence of party identification, however, is also quite strong. Judging from the baseline of Downsian policy voting, I show that independents, even those with lower levels of political sophistication, perform quite well on average, and engage in essentially unbiased spatial policy voting. Partisans of similar levels of sophistication, by contrast, are systematically pushed away from more rational decision rules and seem to be making biased choices in translating their policy preferences into vote choices. On the whole, it seems clear that party identification operates more as a systematic bias than a profitable heuristic. [DRAFT, PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR SHARE WITHOUT PERMISSION]