Seeing How Social Segregation Predicts Perceptions of Partisan Polarization

• In Event: Political Networks, Influence, and Communication in American Politics

Abstract

Antipathy between opposing partisans in the United States has been well-documented, as have accompanying concerns about its potential consequences for democratic stability and effective governance. Partisan stereotyping feeds into these dynamics, but questions remain about the sources of such stereotypes themselves, particularly about the role that social factors may play in their formation. In this paper we look at the relationship between individuals' personal exposure to partisans and their perceptions of what Democrats and Republicans think about salient issues such as immigration and abortion. Using aggregate relational data (ARD) batteries placed on two modules of the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we use network analytic methods to develop measures of the social distance between individuals and the members of each party based on the associations they form in the communities where they live, work, and join. We find an association between individuals' perceptions of the parties and their social exposure to “the other side,” but we also find an asymmetry in these patterns: among Republican respondents, greater social distance predicts more homogeneous views of both the in-group (Republicans) and the out-group (Democrats), but we observe no such pattern for Democrats. We explore how this asymmetry might contribute to Grossman and Hopkins’s (2016) finding that Republican citizens’ political behavior is driven more by ideology while Democrats’ behavior is driven more group identity. Perhaps Republicans’ apparent ideological behavior is an artifact of their relative social segregation from most social groups other than their own. As such, our paper provides a theoretical and analytical perspective to better understand how social and contextual factors build and sustain political polarization.

Authors

• Douglas Ahler, Florida State University

• Matthew Pietryka, Florida State University

• Anand Edward Sokhey, University of Colorado, Boulder