Explaining American voting behavior has proven ever challenging and influenced by prejudices even more so now than during the earlier years of the American democracy. It is phenomenal that the advent of technology has managed to provide modern researchers with mechanisms that are able to sample the grander population into distinct groups associated with social or economic categories. However, the stride toward segregating these samples even further for ethnocentric specifications have been few and limited. It is habitual to encounter analyst who categorize the American electorate into social, economic, and racial group categories such as “the senior citizen vote”, “soccer moms”, “blacks”, or “Hispanics”, except, that the composition of a party’s voter base are surely influenced by factors relevant to specific individual experiences, ethnic sourcing, and culture.
Noting that social factors that underlie partisanship reflect the partisan alignment at the time ; such as The New Deal era when partisan choices tended to fall along economic and social lines , makes it an important need for modern political researchers to expand their scope of research to include ethnic specifications within partisan alignments to properly reflect the economic and social candidness of the American experience for different ethnic groups.
As much as the social composition of partisan groups have been researched, I find them rather insufficient as they merely stick to the good old classifications of people into superficial categories that are more generalizing than particular. Understandably, it is tasking to segregate data to identify the individual. However, determining the tendency of a voting block by using categories such as religion, race, education, and income without the actual statistic of the increment of “1” is wrong, inaccurate, and flawed. My take is the increment of “1” is as important to a partisan make up socially and economically as is the demographic of a general social group or economic class.
Since the impact of a social group on an individual’s behavior is widely acknowledged, and since the voting patterns of voters is reflected by their social group’s political experience, one may argue that it is time to develop more accurate specifications as to who partisans really represent within their respective social groups. For example, it is not enough to say that blacks vote overwhelmingly Democratic while failing to define the “black” in its many possible definitions. Likewise, it is wrong to say Northern European descended partisans swing Republican without representing the specific ethnic experiences that favor such an ideological shift in the first place.
As much as primary group investigations have demonstrated homogeneity amongst families and friends in their partisan preference, it brings to question whether the claimed diversity of American elections is indeed realized at all. As evidence in research has shown socially, people are more likely to associate visual similarities with others with rightness of association rather than objectivity in association. Should we accept therefore that women will likely vote for whom or what most women vote for? Or should we prefer to ask instead, why women who are say “Italian” vote Democratic candidates?
In brief, my valuation of the social characteristics of partisans and independents research done is supportive yet demanding of the social scientists and their measuring mechanisms. Is it enough to shun the existence of “divisionism” ideologies and factors within grander social groups and economic classes in favor of generalizations that satisfy the age’s data collection technologies? Or is political analysis better served when there is a dissection of partisan populations into more representative specific groups rather than generalized categories representing factions of the masses?