NEUTRALITY, NEGATIVITY, OR BOTH? A Reply to Wattenberg Stephen C. Craig Although there are indications that the two major parties in the U.S. have come to have new meaning for many citizens in the 1980s, Wattenberg's data do provide convincing support for his general argument on declining party salience. The following article attempts to clarify the meaning of this trend and to show that a lack of confidence in political par- ties as representative institutions is indeed an obstacle to the restoration of partisan attach- ments at the mass level. Both CPS survey data and depth interview materials are utilized in an effort to understand more fully the complex relationship between the American pub- lic and its party system. After considering the evidence provided by Professor Wattenberg (1981, 1986) and numerous other scholars on contemporary" party politics in the U.S., one would be foolish to contest the notion that "political parties no longer mean as much to people as they once did" (Wattenberg, 1986, p. 35). 1 The post-1964 decline in party loyalties is itself probably one of the most direct indicators of this change. Moreover, as I stated in my original article, the rising proportion of neutral-neutrals-a development that reflects the growing number of people who have nothing at all to say about either the Democrats or the Republicans on the CPS open-ended likes and dislikes questions-is yet another sign "that the major parties have become increas- ingly less salient to the American public over the past two or three decades" (Craig, 1985a, p. 66). The ability to answer these and other open-ended questions certainly is shaped by an individual's language skills and degree of political sophistication, as Wattenberg and his coauthors in another arti- cle (Miller et al., 1986, p. 538) acknowledge when they employ the number of party likes and dislikes as an indicator of "articulateness." It did not escape my attention, however, that the trend toward neutrality occurred during a period in which educational levels were going up rather than down, and I thus was not surprised to learn that candidate neutrality has remained fairly Stephen C. Craig, Department of Political Science, University of Florida, 3824 Turlington Hall, Gainesville, FL ~2611. Political Behavior © 1987 Agathon Press, Inc. Vol. 9, No. 2 126