Core Political Values and the Long-Term Shaping of Partisanship

Party identification has typically been thought to provide the central organizing element for political belief systems, in consequence accounting for other political perceptions, attitudes and, ultimately, vote choice. We argue instead that core values pertaining to equality, collectivism vs individualism, and government intervention vs free enterprise are the fundamental elements of the electorate’s political beliefs. These core values provide long-term coherence to political orientations and explain the development of party preferences, rather than vice-versa. We evaluate these arguments using a validated multiple-item instrument measuring core values, and ordered latent class models to estimate patterns of stability and reciprocal effects with partisanship. We use panel data on individual change from 1991-2007 from 7 waves of the British Household Panel Study. We find that values are more prevalent and stable than partisanship and the cross-lagged estimates show a stronger impact of values on partisanship than the reverse. This pattern is potentially established in respondents’ formative years prior to the emergence of a stable partisan identity.