Red team, blue team
Shankar Vedantam at the Washington Post has an interesting article about political views and party affiliations.
“Party identification is part of your social identity, in the same way you relate to your religion or ethnic group or baseball team,” said Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego.
Referring to political scientist Marc J. Hetherington at Vanderbilt:
Rather, he said, what has happened in recent years is that partisans have come to identify with their parties in much the manner that sports fans identify with their teams. The strong views they feel on many issues do not drive their party affiliation; it is their party affiliation that drives their strong views.
Isn’t there a chicken-and-egg problem here? If political views come from party affiliations, then where do party affiliations come from? We seem to have a cultural assumption that information flows upwards in a political hierarchy (representative democracy, the will of of the people, yada yada yada). On the other hand, in a religious hierarchy we assume that information flows downwards. So if we substitute religion for politics in the basic premise:
Religious views do not drive religious affiliation; rather religious affiliation drives religious views.
It sounds perfectly reasonable. I suspect that in politics, the information flows in both directions, but upwards in some people and downwards in others.