Sobering up after “Partisan Intoxication or Policy Voting?”

“Partisan Intoxication or Policy Voting?” raises questions central to understanding the extent to which individuals vote their partisanship and brings important attention to the potential observational equivalence between partisan and policy voting. In this response, I affirm some of Fowler’s arguments but also build upon existing studies to highlight that tests of the policy voting hypothesis need to seriously consider both the direct and indirect effects of partisanship to understand the relative role of policy versus partisanship. Such consideration is particularly significant as partisanship’s indirect effects can have troubling implications for democracy. I also reexamine the southern realignment and voters’ responses to hypothetical candidate policy positions, and when accounting for elite decision-making and complex information environments, I find voters respond less to candidate ideology and policy positions than suggested by Fowler’s original analyses. Together, my findings underscore the point that “policy voting and partisan intoxication are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive explanations” of voter behavior (Fowler, 2020, p. 144).