The Partisan Sorting of "America": How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

Political scientists have acknowledged the importance of ethno-nationalism as a constitutive element of radical-right politics, but have typically empirically reduced the phenomenon to its downstream attitudinal correlates. Sociologists, on the other hand, have extensively studied nationalism, but have rarely weighed in on debates about institutional politics. In this study, we bring these literatures together by considering how nationalist beliefs shaped respondents' voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalism in the U.S. population. The results suggest that competing understandings of American nationhood were effectively mobilized by candidates from the two parties, both in the 2016 primaries and the general election. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, nationalism has become sorted by party, as Republican identifiers have become predominantly ethno-nationalist and Democrats have increasingly endorsed creedal and disengaged conceptions of nationhood. This points to the rising demand for radical candidates among Republicans and suggests a potentially bleak future for U.S. politics, as nationalism becomes yet another among multiple overlapping social and cultural cleavages that serve to reinforce deep partisan divisions and undermine the stability of liberal democratic institutions.

Divided Dems, United Reps: Party strategy and within-party variation in immigration attitudes

“…There is a large and growing literature on political polarization-growing divides between Democrats and Republicans-in the United States and its various causes and effects (e.g., DellaPosta 2020; Baldassarri and Gelman 2008;Brooks and Manza 2013;McCarty et al 2008;Bonikowski et al 2019;Abramowitz 2013;Layman et al 2006;DiMaggio et al 1996).…”

“…For example, Manza and Brooks (1999) demonstrated the continued importance of social cleavages, such as religion, class, and race, in U.S. national elections over the latter-half of the 20th century. Other work has examined latent cultural cleavages, such as nationalism (Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016) and their impact on politics (Bonikowski et al 2019). While past work has thought of cleavages as an aggregate level phenomenon, we can also think of cleavages as existing within subgroups of a population, such as within political parties.…”

“…Republicans (Sides et al 2018). Recent studies of trends in public polarization have also found that Democrats and Republicans have increasingly split on immigration (Blanco et al 2020) as well as on inclusive and exclusive forms of nationalism, with Republicans becoming more exclusive and Democrats becoming increasingly inclusive (Bonikowski et al 2019).…”

“…Trump notably ran on an explicitly anti-immigration platform, using brazen rhetoric such as referring to Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and "criminals" (Flores 2018;Lamont et al 2017). The early success of the Trump campaign in the Republican primaries drove other serious candidates, such as Ted Cruz, to follow suit in their clear anti-immigration platforms (Bonikowski et al 2019). Going into the 2016 national elections, the Republican party had firmly adopted an anti-immigration platform with continued provocative rhetoric (Sides et al 2018;Elliot and Altman 2015).…”

“…Given immigration's political salience, we would expect both Democrats and Republicans to champion clear positions on it and make it a focal point of their respective platforms. While Republicans have effectively incorporated immigration into the center of their party's platform in recent elections (e.g., Donald Trump ran, and in part won, on an explicit anti-immigrant platform in his 2016 election campaign (Bonikowski et al 2019;Sides et al 2018;Lamont et al 2017), Democrats have largely shied away from the issue. Why have Democrats, unlike Republicans, not seized on immigration?…”