One Tribe to Bind Them All: How Our Social Group Attachments Strengthen Partisanship

Abstract

"Social sorting" is a concept used by Mason (2016) to explain the process by which individuals' social identities grow increasingly aligned with a partisan identity, reducing social cross-pressures on political behavior. Roccas and Brewer (2002) have found that individuals who feel fewer cross-pressures more strongly identify with their ingroups and are less tolerant of outgroups. Accordingly, we create "objective" and "subjective" measures of social sorting to help identify the mechanism by which individual partisans connect social sorting to partisanship in the CCES and a nonprobability Internet sample. As racial, religious, and ideological identities have cumulatively moved into greater alignment with Democratic and Republican identities in recent decades, American partisans have grown increasingly identified with their parties due to the psychological effects of identity alignment captured in objective and subjective sorting mechanisms. However, we find that this effect is more powerful among Republicans than among Democrats, due to the general social homogeneity of the Republican party. Contrary to the assessments of modern political punditry, Republicans are more susceptible to identity-based politics.

Moral polarization and out-party hostility in the US political context

“…We recruited subjects from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a survey platform whose subjects are known to fall short of demographically-representing the wider US population (Chandler & Shapiro, 2016). As highlighted in the introduction, Mason (2016Mason ( , 2018 finds that US party identity is increasingly in alignment with demographic identities (e.g., race, religiosity), and, importantly, that this alignment may serve to weaken barriers to out-party hostility (Mason & Wronski, 2018;Roccas & Brewer, 2002). For this reason, insofar as our subjects did not faithfully represent the demographic identities of the wider US population, it is possible that our analyses mis-estimated the population-level association between moral polarization and out-party hostility in IPD-MD.…”

Vote Switching in the 2016 Election: How Racial and Immigration Attitudes, Not Economics, Explain Shifts in White Voting

“…Traditional views of partisan identification focus on the issues, ideologies, and groups connected to each party, what Huddy et al (2015; call the instrumental conception of partisanship (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954;Campbell et al 1960;Abramowitz and Saunders 2006). More recently, scholars have conceived of partisanship as a social identity, comparable to race or religion (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002;Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015;Huddy and Bankert 2017;Rothschild et al 2018;Mason and Wronski 2018). In this view, partisan affiliation is akin to a salient social group attachment (Tajfel 1981) and partisanship the result of "comparing a judgment about oneself with one's conception of a social group.…”

Ideological Asymmetries in Social Psychological Research: Rethinking the Impact of Political Context on Ideological Epistemology

“…In recent years, political scientists have argued that party realignment has led to a Republican Party that is more socially and culturally homogenous than the Democratic Party (Mason, 2018b;Mason & Wronski, 2018). Mason and colleagues show that strength of partisan attachment has increased for those who are identified with both parties, but this effect is stronger for Republicans given the homogeneity of the group.…”