Evidence of the Long-Term Persistence of Adults' Political Predispositions

Abstract

The persistence hypothesis holds that core political predispositions tend to be highly stable through the life span. It has rarely been tested directly, given the scarcity of long-term, large-sample longitudinal studies. We address it using the Terman longitudinal study, in which the party identification and ideology of 1,272 respondents were measured on four occasions between 1940 and 1977, from roughly age 30 to retirement age. These partisan attitudes were highly stable over this long period, yielding continuity coefficients of about 80 between each measurement (separated by at least 10 years), and 65 for the full 37-year span. Examination of the trajectories of individual attitudes reveals that the most common pattern was constancy across time. A substantial minority changed in small but consistent ways, but changes from one partisan side to the other were not very common. Surprisingly, early-life racial attitudes had a resurgent effect on partisan attitudes in the 1970s. There was evidence of increasing attitude crystallization through the life span, infusing core predispositions with increasing psychological strength over time. Limitations of the study include the high intelligence of the respondents and the "steady state" of the party system through most of this period.