As dealignment processes advance theoretical as well as empirical questions on party identification arise again. One of the key questions to be asked thereby is: What comes after party identification? Will there be times with voters deciding independently from election to election or are there maybe other long standing forces which drive voting behavior? In my paper I use the Social Identity Approach (Thurner 1987) to trace party identification back to its psychological roots. Afterwards I demonstrate that party stereotypes, as cognitive structures which contain knowledge and beliefs about the political parties, are suited to explain voting behavior beyond party identification. My theoretical explanations will be underpinned by the “Stereotype Content Model” (SCM; Fiske et al. 2002) and the BIAS-Map (Cuddy et al. 2007). On the empirical aspect this study draws its results from an online-panel study, carried out in the context of the German lander elections of Baden-Württemberg 2011.
