Republicans Do Have More Zeal Than Their Democratic Counterparts...Pre-1976
I recently questioned the claim that “Republican voters have displayed a zeal for their candidates that Democrats could only envy.” I was going to pursue the claim further by breaking down presidential approval by partisanship, but my co-bloggers, Lee Sigelman and John Sides, as well as Thomas Holbrook and a comment on the original post, suggested using the National Election Studies data. Thomas Holbrook and John Sides were kind enough to do the analysis for me. Holbrook used the feeling thermometer and Sides used the affect (likes-dislikes) toward the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, but both show similar trends.
First, here is Holbrook’s graph:
Second, is Sides’ graph, but this goes back to 1952 (I’ve converted the table into a graph):
As we can see from both graphs (and as Holbrook noted in his email to me), based on the NES feeling thermometer and the affect scores “it does appear that Republicans are more positive (I don’t know if I’d call it ‘love’) about their presidential candidates than Democrats are about their candidates” but since 1976, the “zeal” gap has narrowed considerably.
Comments
I’m still trying to decide whether I’m envious or not.
Posted by: Ben | December 20, 2007 12:49 AM
These data are helpful, but I can’t help wondering whether the “zeal” difference really comes from effort rather than affect. As John noted in an earlier posting, there is some reason to believe that Republicans are more reliable voters than Democrats. Perhaps the are more reliable participators in general and thereby look more zealous.
Posted by: Scott McClurg![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.themonkeycage.org/nav-commenters.gif)
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December 20, 2007 09:08 AM
Alternatively, maybe Republicans interpret those questions differently than Democrats do.
And what about antipathy? Do Republicans rate Democratic candidates consistently lower than Democrats rate Republican candidates? (This may just be from living in Cambridge for the last few years, but I think many Democrats are quite zealously anti-Bush)
The full distribution might be interesting-not just the means. I think we might interpret things differently depending on how the distributions differ: for example, maybe Democrats just never give anyone full marks, while for Republicans its either 0 or 1. Or, maybe, the distributions look very similar, but Republicans are just shifted slightly higher throughout.
Finally, echoing Scott, what we really care about is whether Republicans act more zealously (whatever that means). Some sort of temporary survey-induced zealotry isn’t worth much, right? Might be cool to measure some sort of willingness to pay to vote for your candidate: maybe interact party with voting status and distance to polls?
Posted by: PLW | December 21, 2007 11:14 AM
It seems to me that the graphs measure some combination of zealousness and party unity.
In any given election, we could classify the members of a political party into three groups: (1) those who passionately support the party’s nominee, (2) those who mildly prefer the party’s nominee to the alternatives, and (3) those who plan to vote against the party’s nominee.
It seems to me if the first group is small, that can reasonably be described as a lack of zeal. On the other hand, if the third group is large (as occurred in 1972, when large numbers of Democrats voted for Nixon over McGovern), that should be described as a lack of party unity rather than as a lack of zeal. As I recall, McGovern supporters were very zealous in 1972. Unfortunately for McGovern, McGovern supporters only constituted about 36% of the population.
Posted by: Kenneth Almquist | December 23, 2007 06:24 PM