Where You Live and Who You Know

Abstract

Do the social pressures individuals encounter from the political environments they reside in affect the stability of their partisanship? Are some citizens able to insulate themselves from such pressure through the composition of their discussion networks? While partisanship is widely regarded as stable, I consider whether it is influenced by such factors. I use panel data from the 1992-1996 and 2000-2004 American National Election Studies to address this, constructing a measure of partisan context at the county level. I find that those residing in a partisan minority county are more likely to change their party identification and that as the degree of incongruence rises, individuals become increasingly likely to change their identification across panel waves. These findings demonstrate the powerful effect of contextual social forces on an otherwise stable and enduring attachment such as partisanship and suggest that partisan socialization is a process that extends beyond an individual’s childhood.