Reconsidering Party Identification in Western Europe.

Party Identification looms large in the debates on public opinion and voting behavior in the United States. Most attempts to export this concept to similar studies in Western Europe have found this concept dead on arrival across the Atlantic. We believe that Western European electorates do have varying degrees of partisan identification that act much like party identification and attribute the failures of previous studies to find such effects on flawed measurement techniques. We begin with a detailed discussion of how we believe this identification works in Western Europe and propose a new method of operationalizing this concept with survey data from a variety of sources. We then test a set of hypotheses about how the resulting new partisan identification variables influence both party mobilization and electoral support. These hypotheses are tested with data from surveys administered at the time of national and European parliamentary elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]