Party, Race, and Neutrality: Investigating the Interdependence of Attitudes toward Social Groups

Abstract

Recent public and scholarly discourse suggests that partisanship informs how people feel about social groups in the United States by organizing those groups into camps of political friends and enemies. More generally, this implies that Americans’ attitudes toward social groups exhibit interdependence, a heretofore underexplored proposition. We develop a conceptual and methodological approach to investigating such interdependence and apply it to attitudes toward 17 social groups, the broadest set of measures available to date. We identify three subpopulations with distinct attitude logics: partisans, who feel warm toward groups commonly associated with their political party and cool toward those linked to the out-party; racials, distinguished by their consistently warmer or cooler feelings toward all racial groups relative to other forms of social group membership; and neutrals, who generally evaluate social groups neither warmly nor coolly. Individuals’ social positions and experiences, particularly the strength of their partisanship, their race, and their experience of racial discrimination, inform how they construe the social space. These findings shed light on contemporary political and social divisions while expanding the toolkit available for the study of attitudes toward social groups.

Cultural Matching in Networks: A Combination of Machine Learning and Exponential Random Graph Models to Examine Homophily in Identity Performance

“…First, there is no constraint regarding the sources of data. In addition to applying computational methods to text data (Arseniev-Koehler and Foster 2022, Knight 2022, Kozlowski, Taddy and Evans 2019, Nelson 2021, Voyer et al 2022, Zhou 2022, such methods have also been applied to social survey data for a long time (Boutyline and Vaisey 2017, Brensinger and Sotoudeh 2022, DellaPosta 2020, Goldberg 2011. Second, while the computational method is a quantitative technique, its methodology is compatible with qualitative methodologies (Nelson 2017, Nelson 2021 and can be combined with several important theoretical insights coming from qualitative analyses (Arseniev-Koehler andFoster 2022, Nelson 2021).…”

The Polarization of Popular Culture: Tracing the Size, Shape, and Depth of the “Oil Spill”

“…Justification for this possibility is found in the fact that both political elites (Fishkin and Pozen 2018;Thomsen 2014) and everyday Americans (Hacker and Pierson 2015;Morisi, Jost, and Singh 2019;Rawlings 2022) are asymmetrically polarized, ranging on everything from more foundational items like cognitive processing styles and tolerance of uncertainty (Jost 2017a(Jost , 2017b, to how much animus is felt for the partisan outgroup (Bail et al 2018;Gift and Gift 2015;Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012;Kalmoe and Mason 2022). For example, racial like/dislike partially structures partisan logics (Brensinger and Sotoudeh 2022), and as found by Már (2020) conservative affective polarization is particularly oriented around racial animus targeted at Black Americans. In turn, as found by Grossmann and Hopkins (2016), there is a fundamental asymmetry in how liberals and conservatives are socially organized, which, we believe, may also be mirrored in the structuring of their tastes.…”