Perhaps the most influential work on voting behavior in the United States is The American Voter by Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes (1960). While the book touches on a number of areas of political behavior, it is most widely cited for its emphasis of party identification – longstanding and largely unchanging loyalties to a political party, usually developed by voters at a young age – as the primary determinant of vote choice and other political actions. The American Voter stands as the central work of the so-called Michigan school of political behavior, which argues that voters are overwhelmingly unsophisticated, making political decisions without much planning or reason, and guided mostly by a sense of personal loyalty to one of the two major political parties.

Most works categorized under the Michigan school umbrella downplay policy ideology not only as a meaningful predictor of vote choice, but also as existing in the first place for the majority of voters: