This scale measures how strongly a person identifies with their political party as a social group: how important the party is to them, how well the label describes them, and how often they think of the party as "we". Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe (2015) modelled it on measures of national identity and tested it in four U.S. samples: politically engaged blog readers, a New York State telephone poll, a national YouGov panel and undergraduate students. Their work showed that this expressive, identity-based partisanship predicted campaign involvement and political anger better than the strength or consistency of a person's issue positions.
Item-specific verbal scales (4 or 5 points, e.g., extremely important to not important at all; all of the time to never); scores rescaled 0–1
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
Alphas ranged from .81 to .90 across the four studies (Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015); study-by-study values were not itemised. Partisan identity predicted campaign activity and anger at threatened electoral loss beyond traditional partisan strength and ideological issue intensity. Items are worded for the party the respondent named in a standard party identification question, so the party label in brackets should be replaced accordingly; the format adapts readily to other party systems. Response options: item 1 extremely important / very important / not very important / not important at all; item 2 extremely well / very well / not very well / not at all; item 3 all of the time / most of the time / some of the time / rarely / never; item 4 a great deal / somewhat / very little / not at all. Responses are averaged and rescaled to run from 0 to 1.
Huddy, L., Mason, L., & Aarøe, L. (2015). Expressive partisanship: Campaign involvement, political emotion, and partisan identity. American Political Science Review, 109(1), 1–17.
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