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Who’s at the Party? Group Sentiments and the Social Bases of Partisanship

Fri, August 30, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hilton, Rock Creek

Abstract

Classic scholarship on the foundations of partisanship often invoked the argument that sentiments toward various social groups affect citizens’ orientations toward each of the two major parties in the United States. From The American Voter (Campbell et al. 1960) to more contemporary work (Green, Palmquist & Schickler 2002; Achen & Bartels 2016; Mason 2018), this psychological approach examines partisanship through the lens of social identities. A fundamental implication of this approach is that partisan orientations are, themselves, determined by citizens’ feelings toward the particular kinds of people – i.e., social groups – who embody that party's membership. We refer to this as the "Group Sentiments Model of Partisanship" (GSMP). Yet, despite its fundamentality to American politics, the empirical support for the GSMP is limited in manifold respects – including the reliance on correlational evidence, and the consideration of only a few key social group identities.

Relying upon a bevy of cross-sectional, panel, and experimental data, the present study more thoroughly investigates, and finds renewed support for, the GSMP. First, using the 2016 CCES and a Qualtrics Panels survey fielded in 2016, we demonstrate that (1) citizens are cognizant of how more than twenty politically-relevant social groups align with the parties, and that (2) citizens’ partisanship is consistently related to affect and closeness toward these various groups, even after accounting for citizens own social group memberships. Second, we leverage the Democracy Fund's Voter Study Group panel to show that changes in affinities toward the coalition of groups aligned with the Republican and Democratic parties between 2011 and 2016 influences party identity in 2017. Finally, results from a 2018 Qualtrics Panels survey experiment reveal that linking a negatively-viewed group with a party can directly impact citizens’ attachment to that party. Taken together, the results offer repeated support for the proposition that sentiments toward various social groups in society are systematically—and causally—related to identification with the two major parties in the United States.

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