An independent voter, often also called an unaffiliated voter or non-affiliated voter in the United States, is a voter who does not align themselves with any political party. An independent is variously defined as a voter who votes for candidates on issues or policies rather than on the basis of a political ideology or partisanship;Sorauf and Beck, Party Politics in America, 1988. a voter who does not have long-standing loyalty to, or identification/affiliation with, a political party;Flanigan and Zingale, Political Behavior of the American Electorate, 1988.Wolfinger, "The Promising Adolescence of Campaign Surveys," in Campaigns and Elections American Style, 1995. a voter who does not usually vote for the same political party and their candidates from election to election;Key, The Responsible Electorate, 1966.DeVries and Tarrance, The Ticket Splitter, 1972. or a voter who self-describes themselves as an independent.Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes, The American Voter, 1960.
Many voting systems outside of the United States, including the British parliamentary system, do not utilize a party affiliation system as part of their voter registration process; rather, participation in party affairs is based on enrolling as a member within the party itself, and the number of party members is much smaller than the party's total electorate (for example, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which received 12 million votes in the 2021 German federal election, only has 400,000 members). The closest equivalent is the so-called "floater voters" or swing votes, who do not consistently vote for a particular party.
Definition The earliest concept of independents is of a person whose political choices, by definition, were made based on issues and candidates (due to lack of party affiliation). Furthermore, early studies of voting behavior conclusively demonstrated that self-identified independent voters are less interested in specific elections than partisan voters, poorly informed about issues and candidates, and less active politically. However, a contrary view emerged: The independent usually voted on the basis of deeply ingrained beliefs, attitudes and loyalties, and is more like the strongly partisan voter than any other voter (or the idealized "independent").Petrocik, "An Analysis of Intransitivities in the Index of Party Identification," Political Methodology, Summer 1974.Hershey, Party Politics in America, 2007.Dennis, "Political Independence in America, Part I: On Being an Independent Partisan Supporter," British Journal of Political Science, January 1988.
By the 1960s, scholars attempted to define the independent based on behavior, rather than party identification or loyalty. Focusing on ticket splitters, these studies depicted an independent voter who had the same level of political interest as strong partisans and who voted largely based on the issues with which they strongly agreed or disagreed. However, by focusing on voting behavior, this definition of the independent ignored non-voters. Critics claimed that the independent voter is merely a subset of the larger set of independents, which should also include non-voters. Studies also found that voting and not-voting is deeply affected by the particular candidate running in an election. Voting, therefore, is more reflective of what candidate is running—and therefore a poor measure of partisanship.Ladd and Hadley, "Party Definition and Party Differentiation," Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 1973.Brody and Page, "Comment: Assessment of Policy Voting," American Political Science Review, June 1972; Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections, 1981; Page and Jones, "Reciprocal Effects of Policy Preferences, Party Loyalties and the Vote," American Political Science Review, December 1979.
More recently, scholars focused on self-identification as a good measure of a person's political independence. The value of self-identification as a measure of a person's political independence or partisanship is that it is seen as a proxy for the behavior which should be exhibited by the independent voter. Additionally, self-identification could be easily captured either with a nominal question ("Do you self-identify with an existing political party?", a question which is answered with a "yes" or a "no"), or by a structured ordinal question ("Generally speaking, do you consider yourself a Democrat, a Republican, an independent, or what?").Backstrom and Hursh-César, Survey Research, 1981. The first analyses of this measure of political independence found that there were significant differences between those individuals who self-identified as "independent" and those who listed "no preference" as to party identification.Miller and Wattenberg, "Measuring Party Identification: Independent or No Partisan Preference?", American Journal of Political Science, February 1983. Individuals who expressed "no preference" usually exhibited low levels of interest in politics, low levels of knowledge about the candidates and issues, low frequency of voting, and less confidence in their ability to influence politics.More recent research has found that individuals expressing "no preference" but who have moderate to high levels of political interest behave more like those self-describing themselves as "independents" than they do others who self-describe as "no preference." Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952-1996, 1998.
Although some scholars continue to conclude that self-description is the best measure of partisanship or independence, a number of studies have found debilitating problems with this measure. The nature of the voter registration system and the appearance of the ballot, the way the question reinforces a unidimensional interpretation of the political arena, the measure's failure to function in a multi-party political system, the measure's confusion of the theoretical relationship between partisanship and the intent to vote, question wording errors which confuse a social group with a political party, failure to predict policy (versus candidate) preferences, question order, and failure to measure partisanship accurately when there are sizeable differences in party size all confound accurate measurement of partisanship and independence using this measure.Finkel and Scarrow, "Party Identification and Party Enrollment: The Difference and the Consequences," Journal of Politics, June 1985; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler, Partisan Hearts and Minds, 2004; Clarke and Kornberg, "Support for the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party Since 1988: The Impact of Economic Evaluations and Economic Issues," Canadian Journal of Political Science, March 1992; Converse and Pierce, "Partisanship and the Party System," Political Behavior, September 1992; Alvarez, "The Puzzle of Party Identification: Dimensionality of an Important Concept," American Politics Research, October 1990; Bishop, Tuchfarber, and Oldendick, "Change in the Structure of American Political Attitudes: The Nagging Question of Question Wording," American Journal of Political Science, May 1978; Bartle, "Improving the Measurement of Party Identification in Britain," in British Elections & Parties Review, 1999.Johnston, "Party Identification Measures in the Anglo-American Democracies: A National Survey Experiment," American Journal of Political Science, May 1992.Survey question order is still a vexatious issue. Some studies conclude it biases results, and creates a survey artifact which shows large numbers of independents. See: Heath and Pierce, "It Was Party Identification All Along: Question Order Effects on Reports of Party Identification in Britain," Electoral Studies, June 1992. Other studies conclude that survey order has no effect. See: McAllister and Watternberg, "Measuring Levels of Party Identification: Does Question Order Matter?", Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 1995.Some studies draw the conclusion that a unidimensional concept of partisanship is nevertheless accurate. See: Green, "On the Dimensionality of Public Sentiment Toward Partisan and Ideological Groups," American Journal of Political Science, August 1988. Even the nature of a survey instrument as a measure of partisanship and independence has been called into question.In one study, scholars found wide differences in survey respondents' abilities to recall political ideologies and apply them to questions about how they feel about policy issues of the day. Independents, it was suggested, have a lower level of ability to apply ideological tools of assessment to policy issues. The survey instrument, with its focus on making snap judgments, may therefore falsely measure the level of political independence. See: Huckfeldt, Levine, Morgan, and Sprague, "Accessibility and the Political Utility of Partisan and Ideological Orientations," American Journal of Political Science, July 1999.
Terminology There are several synonyms for the term independent voter: In the U.S. state of Florida, a registered voter who chooses not to affiliate with a political party is termed no party affiliation (NPA). In the U.S. state of Massachusetts, a registered voter who chooses not to enroll in a political party or designation is termed unenrolled. In the U.S. state of Oregon, a registered voter who chooses not to affiliate with a political party is termed a non-affiliated voter (NAV). In the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, registered voters may choose the designation unaffiliated in lieu of a party affiliation.
Partisan influence To many scholars, independence seemed the flip-side of partisanship. Identifying the variables which are significant in creating partisanship would, therefore, identify the variables which are significant in creating political independence. Subsequently, a very large body of scholarship has emerged which has attempted to analyze partisanship.
Parents appear to be a primary source of political socialization and partisanship. Much of the theoretical basis for this hypothesis emerged from the fields of child psychology and social learning, which studied the ways in which children are socialized and values inculcated in them. Studies of political partisanship have found that partisanship is strongest when both parents have the same political loyalties, these loyalties are strong, both parents have similarly strong party loyalties, and parental partisanship accords with socio-economic status (for example, the wealthy are Republicans or the poor are Labour supporters).Beck and Jennings, "Parents As 'Middlepersons' in Political Socialization," Journal of Politics, February 1975; Hess and Torney, The Development of Political Attitudes in Children, 1967; Beck and Jennings, "Family Traditions, Political Periods, and the Development of Partisan Orientations," Journal of Politics, August 1991.Bandura, Social Learning Theory, 1977; Chaffee, McLeod and Wackman, "Family Communication Patterns and Adolescent Participation," in Socialization to Politics: A Reader, 1973.Niemi and Jennings, "Issues and Inheritance in the Formation of Party Identification," American Journal of Political Science, November 1991.Achen, "Parental Socialization and Rational Party Identification," Journal of Political Behavior,June 2002.Knoke and Hout, "Social and Demographic Factors in American Political Party Affiliations, 1952-72," American Sociological Review, October 1974.Giles and Hertz, "Racial Threat and Partisan Identification," American Political Science Review, June 1994.Campbell, "The Young and the Realigning: A Test of the Socialization Theory of Realignment," Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 2002.