Research

Political scientists often claim that partisanship is explained by nonpolicy factors such as early childhood experiences, parental influence, and group membership. In this paper, we use open-ended survey questions to elicit partisan Americans’ own explanations for their affiliations as well as their attitudes toward the opposite party. Policy, values, and ideology are the most common reasons Americans say they identify as a Democrat or Republican and feel the way they do about members of the other party. The rate at which these reasons are cited far exceeds expectations of published scholars of partisanship. Findings do not vary meaningfully across party, region, gender, race, age, or socioeconomic status.

Sorting – the phenomenon that individuals who share an ideological identity and/or social identities increasingly select into the same party – drives affective polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the US. However, how sorting has changed over time and who is more likely to sort along partisan lines is less understood. We argue that choosing the “correct” partisan group to align with one’s social identities requires political awareness, such that the most engaged individuals are most likely to be sorted. Relying on ANES surveys from 1972, we first show that both partisan-ideological sorting and social sorting increased in the past few decades. Not all voters were equally likely to sort, however: more-aware individuals are more likely to be sorted. The gap on sorting between the least and most aware has narrowed as party elites have become more polarized. 

Does American identity still bind us together? As scholars explore approaches to mitigate affective polarization, one promising intervention—priming a Common Ingroup Identity (CII) through national identity—has attracted significant attention. However, recent findings suggest that this intervention may not be as effective as once believed. Through a replication of Levendusky’s (2018) experiment, and a conceptual replication using Nationscape and American National Election Studies survey data, this study uncovers two critical findings. First, Levendusky’s treatment is no longer effective in constraining affective polarization in the current political context. Second, negative feeling to the nation is closely associated with intensified out-party animosity. This research contributes to our understanding of the limitations of depolarization interventions and highlights the potential negative consequences that may arise when national identity is activated in a hyperpolarized environment.

Introduction: The status-legitimacy hypothesis (SLH) posits that low-status individuals are more motivated to justify oppressive social systems than high-status beneficiaries. However, recent research suggests this phenomenon is inconsistent, indicating critical moderators are overlooked.We revisit the SLH examining authoritarianism’s moderating role.

Methods: Using two large representative datasets—the General Social Survey (1972-2018) and American National Election Study (1992-2020)—we examine how authoritarianism conditions the association between social class and system justification across attitudes toward government and economy.

Results: Regarding government attitudes, authoritarianism is mostly associated with greater support for the SLH. However, regarding economic attitudes, findings are more complex, revealing nuanced patterns in how authoritarianism moderates the class-system justification relationship.

Conclusion: These findings warrant reconsideration of what status legitimacy means for high- versus low-status individuals. This work expands system justification theory by identifying authoritarianism as a personality trait shaping system perceptions and offers a path toward reconciling conflicting empirical findings on social class effects on perceived status legitimacy.

 Affective polarization—that is, personal dislike and distrust between Democrats and Republicans—is argued to arise, at least in part, from fewer cross-cutting ties that bridge Democrats and Republicans. We argue that this phenomenon might be specifically relevant to non-Latino white Americans, but less so to Latinos who form a politically diverse group with strong social ties that unite them. Across six years of American National Election Studies data and original survey data from twelve different states across the country, we first show that cross-cutting group memberships predict warmer out-party affect. We then show, across our multiple datasets, that Latinos hold more cross-cutting ties than do non-Latino whites. Further, our data reveal that Latinos consistently hold warmer views of the out-party. Finally, we show with novel survey data that Latinos are especially warm toward out-partisans from within the Latino community. We conclude that affective polarization is less prevalent among Latino Americans who make up the fastest-growing proportion of the American electorate. More broadly, we argue that political behavior among white Americans should not be generalized across ethnic groups without considering unique characteristics of each group. 

Democratic accountability relies on voters to punish their representatives for policies they dislike. Yet, a separation-of-powers system can make it hard to know who is to blame, and partisan biases further distort voters’ evaluations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, precautionary policies were put into place sometimes by governors, sometimes by mayors, and sometimes by no one at all, allowing us to identify when voters hold out-party versus in-party politicians responsible for policies. With a survey spanning 48 states, we test our theory that attitudes toward policies and parties intersect to determine when selective attribution takes place. We find that as individuals increasingly oppose a policy, they are more likely to blame whichever level of government is led by the out-party. This is most pronounced among partisans with strong in-party biases. We provide important insight into the mechanisms that drive selective attribution and the conditions under which democratic accountability is at risk.

This is a registered report for a study of racial and ethnic variation in the relationship between negativity bias and political attitudes. Pioneering work on the psychological and biological roots of political orientation has suggested that political conservatism is driven in large part by enhanced negativity bias. This work has been criticized on several theoretical fronts, and recent replication attempts have failed. To dig deeper into the contours of when (and among whom) negativity bias predicts conservatism, we investigate a surprisingly overlooked factor in existing literature: race and ethnicity. We propose that political issues represent threat or disgust in different ways depending on one’s race and ethnicity. We recruited 174 White, Latinx, and Asian American individuals (in equal numbers) to examine how the relationship between negativity bias and political orientation varies by race/ethnicity across four domains: policing/criminal justice, immigration, economic redistribution, and religious social conservatism.