The Unpolarized: Why African-Americans Are an Exception to Polarization

• In Event: Reconsidering Polarization

Abstract

Recent work on affective polarization suggests that social identities, ideological identities and party identities are becoming ‘stacked’, reinforcing each other in interlocking fashion (Mason 2018; Klein 2020). However, the results of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections showed racial depolarization as minorities moved toward the Republicans while in 2020, whites shifted toward the Democrats.
This paper contends that African-Americans constitute an exception to the polarizing trends of the past few decades. First of all, partisanship and ideology are much less closely aligned among Blacks than they are among whites. Second, Blacks are much less likely to exhibit ideologically-constrained issue positions than whites, and this is not a function of education level or political sophistication.
Even as some have noted the different meaning of conservatism within the African-American community (Philpot 2017), few have remarked on Black exceptionalism to polarization.
Using moral foundations theory and new survey data, this paper argues that neither African-Americans nor white liberals possess what Mason and Klein term ‘stacked’ identities. In the former case, group identity is linked to party identity in unmediated fashion, while in the latter instance, group identity plays no role. Only for white conservatives is there an interlocking racial and ideological connection to party identity.
This paper also uses ANES data to show that African-Americans have diverged from white Americans since 1972, failing to follow the same trajectory toward sorting issues into a single liberal-conservative ideological framework, or toward matching such ideologies with the ‘appropriate’ party. On some issues, Blacks are more conservative than whites, and on others they are more liberal, but in all cases, partisan and ideological differences are relatively modest. Blacks are much less sorted then whites, with the racial difference increasing over time, and exhibit weaker hostility toward those holding opposing ideologies.
Using new surveys of Black and White Americans, I show how only white conservatives have ‘stacked’ social and ideological identities, in which both reinforce partisanship. White liberals have strong ideological identities but weak group identity, while Black liberals and conservatives have strong group identity but weak ideological identity.
Hispanic and Asian voters appear to lie between the two patterns, suggesting that a more diverse America may become less, rather than more, polarized, as has been assumed.

Author

• Eric P. Kaufmann, Birkbeck College, University of London