What moves macropartisanship? A response to Green, Palmquist, and Schickler
decade ago (MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1989), we saw our contribution as the following basic points. First, we showed that macrolevel party identification undergoes considerable movement over time. Second, we showed that much of this movement tracks changes in presidential approval and the economy as monitored by the Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment. In retrospect, "Macropartisanship" is remarkable for what it did not say. Apart from chiding the then conventional view that national partisan sentiment seldom moves except when shaken by rare "realignments," the article offered few specifics about the nature of the macropartisanship time series. And it offered no specific viewpoint about microlevel party identification, other than dutifully citing competing "schools" ("psychological attachment" versus "running tally"). The motivating theoretical argument of that article, evidently original for its time, was that the relative stability of microlevel party identification did not logically require that macrolevel partisanship be a constant. These empirical results merely put partisanship back in the realm of politics. Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (1998) charge that our earlier work seriously overestimated the effects of consumer sentiment and presidential approval on macropartisanship. More may be at stake than the size of a