“You can not like cake but still have a favourite”: How people evaluate and engage with political parties in multi-party systems

While partisanship is a popular measure for predicting a broad range of political and social variables, its true nature is not well understood, particularly outside the U.S. in multi-party democracies. This study uses a series of open-ended survey questions (Australian sample, N = 81) to inductively examine party evaluation, whether this can lead to identification with parties and for whom. Further, we explore negative partisanship and the nature of political independence. Using qualitative content analysis, we find issues of morality, party effectiveness and value/policy congruence are among the most common factors of positive and negative party evaluation. However, negative attitudes were often directed toward a particular group (not necessarily a political party, e.g. “all left-wing parties”) denoting their most threatening out-group. Most participants claimed not to identify with any political party, due to their values (which some acknowledged a political party represented) being the aspect relevant to their identity, rather than the party itself. Political independents were described in a similar way to previous U.S.-based research, i.e. morally superior and free from party constraints or biases. Overall, our research suggests that more complex measures are required to capture and understand partisanship than what currently exists in political and psychological research.