Party attachments and state election laws

This article examines the influence that state party registration laws have on individual-level party attachments. It tests the hypothesis that individuals living in states with party registration laws are more likely than those living in states without such laws to identify themselves as partisans. This occurs primarily because of self-perception processes by which registrants infer their party attitudes from their own behaviors. Using the state-based Senate Election Study data to test this expectation, we find strong evidence for both statistically and substantively significant effects of party registration on individual partisanship. Registered indi-viduals living in states with party registration are, by about ten percent-age points, more likely to identify as partisans than those in other states even when controlling for alternative hypotheses dealing with state cul-ture, attitudes toward the parties, retrospective evaluations, interest in politics, and demographic factors. Importantly, the effect is not observed for individuals who are not registered to vote but is for registered non-voters. However, registration-induced party identification is shallow, as individuals living in registration states are also more likely to vote for candidates from the other party In this article we consider the influence that state party registration laws have on party identification. We argue that the presence of a state party registra-tion law fosters individual-level party attachments. In all conceptions of party identification, whether partisanship is conceived of as exogenous or endogenous, partisan attitudes are thought to drive behavior. In contrast, we demonstrate that in some cases partisan attitudes are actually inferred from behavior-in this case, NOTE: Data are provided by the InterUniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, which bears no responsibility for the analysis or interpretations here. We thank Tom Nelson, Herb Weisberg, and the editors for helpful comments. The authors contributed equally and are listed alphabeticall