There is allegiance to a political party and there is allegiance to certain political ideology -- and over time (e.g. a couple of decades) you can get a serious divergence.
I wouldn't expect that to matter much. Political parties being made of people, I'd expect their ideological alignments to shift no more quickly than their constituents'; weird network effects might override this under certain circumstances, but in the context of US politics this historically doesn't seem to happen very much. (Even the Southern shift was almost exclusively about emphasis on civil rights; both parties' economic policies and broader ideologies remained more or less stable.)
Political parties being made of people, I'd expect their ideological alignments to shift no more quickly than their constituents';
Political parties are also often made of factions. The outcomes of their power struggles might significantly change the party's character.
In general, I suspect we need to be clear about when we are speaking about human universals and when we are speaking about politics in a given country. The US political parties are not the same as, say, the European political parties and I would expect the political behaviour (e.g. party lo...
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: