Abstract
This paper examines the effect of party affiliation on an individual's political views. To do this, we exploit the party realignment that occurred in the U.S. due to abortion becoming a more prominent and highly partisan issue over time. We show that abortion was not a highly partisan issue in 1982, but a person's abortion views in 1982 led many to switch parties over time as the two main parties diverged in their stances on this issue. We find that voting for a given political party in 1996, due to the individual's initial views on abortion in 1982, has a substantial effect on a person's political, social, and economic attitudes in 1997. These findings are stronger for highly partisan political issues, and are robust to controlling for a host of personal views and characteristics in 1982 and 1997. As individuals realigned their party affiliation in accordance with their initial abortion views, their other political views followed suit.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 504-524 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Journal of Comparative Economics |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Ruben Enikolopov, two anonymous reviewers, Christian Dustmann, Moses Shayo, and seminar participants at the CEPR Public Economics Annual Symposium, Hebrew University, New York University, Tel Aviv University, and Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya for helpful comments. Zeev Goldschmidt and Rotem Horowitz provided us with outstanding research assistance. We thank The Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research for financial support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association for Comparative Economic Studies