Do Opinion-Based or Social Group Identities (or Both) Divide Society?

• In Event: Economic Inequality, Redistribution, and Public Opinion

Abstract

Do people like or dislike social groups because of their political opinions, or do they like or dislike political opinions because of the social groups associated with them? We build a theoretical model of why opinion-based and social group-based polarization are connected and test this with a survey experiment embedded in the British Election Study Internet Panel. The opinion-based identities concern immigration and the environment: the universalist-nationalist cleavage. The social identity we focus on is the working class, a group of considerable salience in the British context. When self-identifying working class respondents are informed that the working class is the majority in one of the opinion-based groups, they feel closer to that group. However, respondents feel more distant from the working class when they believe this class is the majority in the opposing opinion-based group. We thus show that social group and opinion-based polarization are intertwined, one influencing the other. Our results offer a novel perspective on how and why socio-structural identities are linked to opinions.

Authors

• Ronja Sczepanski, ETH Zurich

• Geoffrey Evans, Oxford University