Become Who You Are: The Homing Pattern in Partisanship as a Self-Reinforcing Stochastic Process

Abstract

Partisanship is characterized by a “homing” pattern in which individuals pick a party and alternate between supporting and not supporting it. We present a stochastic model in which the probability to announce an attachment depends on an initial propensity to support the party and the number of times support has been announced before. The model reproduces the empirical distributions of the total number of utterances of party preferences in German panel data holding the longest and most dense measurement of Partisanship worldwide.