A complicating factor is that political parties change, too. There is allegiance to a political party and there is allegiance to certain political ideology—and over time (e.g. a couple of decades) you can get a serious divergence.
they’re probably being run yearly
That may make more sense—I assumed (without a good reason) a much longer time horizon.
There is allegiance to a political party and there is allegiance to certain political ideology—and over time (e.g. a couple of decades) you can get a serious divergence.
I wouldn’t expect that to matter much. Political parties being made of people, I’d expect their ideological alignments to shift no more quickly than their constituents’; weird network effects might override this under certain circumstances, but in the context of US politics this historically doesn’t seem to happen very much. (Even the Southern shift was almost exclusively about emphasis on civil rights; both parties’ economic policies and broader ideologies remained more or less stable.)
Political parties being made of people, I’d expect their ideological alignments to shift no more quickly than their constituents’;
Political parties are also often made of factions. The outcomes of their power struggles might significantly change the party’s character.
In general, I suspect we need to be clear about when we are speaking about human universals and when we are speaking about politics in a given country. The US political parties are not the same as, say, the European political parties and I would expect the political behaviour (e.g. party loyalty) to be noticeably different between the continents.
In particular, under a two-party system the opportunities for changing party allegiance look to me much more limited compared to under a multi-party system.
A complicating factor is that political parties change, too. There is allegiance to a political party and there is allegiance to certain political ideology—and over time (e.g. a couple of decades) you can get a serious divergence.
That may make more sense—I assumed (without a good reason) a much longer time horizon.
So: politics is not about policy. But we already knew that...
Politics is complicated and multifaceted and diverse. It is about identity, and about policy, and about power, and about money, etc. etc.
I wouldn’t expect that to matter much. Political parties being made of people, I’d expect their ideological alignments to shift no more quickly than their constituents’; weird network effects might override this under certain circumstances, but in the context of US politics this historically doesn’t seem to happen very much. (Even the Southern shift was almost exclusively about emphasis on civil rights; both parties’ economic policies and broader ideologies remained more or less stable.)
Political parties are also often made of factions. The outcomes of their power struggles might significantly change the party’s character.
In general, I suspect we need to be clear about when we are speaking about human universals and when we are speaking about politics in a given country. The US political parties are not the same as, say, the European political parties and I would expect the political behaviour (e.g. party loyalty) to be noticeably different between the continents.
In particular, under a two-party system the opportunities for changing party allegiance look to me much more limited compared to under a multi-party system.