Macropartisanship implies that people respond to the political world when making up their party identification.
[citation needed] Younger and/or weakly affiliated identifiers tend to be more affected by external events and influences.
The term macropartisanship was first used by American political scientists Michael MacKuen, Robert Erikson and James Stimson in 1989,[1] to describe the overall balance between the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States.
In the work of MacKuen and his colleagues, as well as in later work drawing on the concept, macropartisanship theory begins with the notion that short-term shifts in the party balance are systematic, rather than random (as in the "non-attitudes" explanation put forward by Converse in "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," 1964).
These shifts can be the result of presidential popularity, subjective views of the economy, or political events such as wars or scandals, and are measured through the series of party identification questions used on a variety of surveys.