Richard J. Timpone and Francis K. Neely
 State University of New York at Stony Brook

     The measurement and stability of party identification has been an area of important debate for decades.  We hypothesize that a systematic problem may exist in the traditional 7-point scale that has not yet been examined.  We posit that the follow-up question asking independents the direction of the leaning is asking respondents a fundamentally different question than the other questions of general allegiance and strength.  In short, the direction of leaning may be providing more direct evaluation of short-term factors such as candidate evaluation and vote choice.  If this is the case, the direction of causality for these individuals may be mis-specified in traditional studies of voting behavior.  We examine this question by using the NES Gulf War Panel Study to investigate the systematic determinants of change in individual party identification through structural equation modeling.  While short-term forces do not appear to significantly influence the strength or direction of partisanship for individuals identifying with the parties, they are significantly related to direction of leaning for partisans.  This differential endogeneity between short-term forces and party identification has important implications for the measurement and use of the concept of partisanship.  It also helps illuminate earlier work into "paradoxical" relationships such as the intransitivity of candidate support and comparisons of different measures.