The Polarization of Group-Centrism in the U.S.

• In Event: Poster Session: STEP 2 & New Perspectives within Political Psychology
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: New Perspectives within Political Psychology

Abstract

Scholars often view public opinion and political decision-making as group-centric and find group judgments are increasingly associated with partisanship. Present theorizing and evidence suggest group-centric thinking is foundational and broadly employed: individuals’ levels of group-centrism form outside of politics and Democrats and Republicans are similarly group-centric. We argue, however, that such perspectives are incomplete, ignoring the effects of important recent social and political changes plausibly dividing partisans vis-à-vis group-centric motives and a growing literature on the political bases of even fundamental orientations. We study these possibilities by investigating the relationship between U.S. residents’ ethnocentrism—their concern with intra-group deviance and inter-group difference¬—and their partisanship since the 1990s. We contrast White Americans and people of color to capture the different implications group-centrism has for party preference between majority and minority groups and the divergent effects the social and political flux forging these connections has across the U.S. racial hierarchy. We first use data from the American National Election Study to chart the relationship between ethnocentrism and partisanship. We find a strengthening relationship between ethnocentrism and Republican Party identification among Whites since 2008 and a largely stable relationship between ethnocentrism and Democratic partisanship since the 1990s for people of color. We then use panel data from the Democracy Fund spanning 2011-2020 to study the degree to which these relationships reflect group-centric sorting or party-driven change. We find a reliable bidirectional relationship between ethnocentrism and partisanship among Whites, with suggestive but imprecise evidence of the same among people of color: ethnocentrism motivates Whites (people of color) to identify more as Republicans (Democrats) and Republican (Democratic) partisanship increases ethnocentrism among Whites (people of color). Our results demonstrate that not only are partisans divided in their views of specific groups, they are also increasingly divided in the degree to which they fundamentally care about those in their in-groups and out-groups, with partisanship potentially even shaping these basic group-centric motivations.

Author

• Andrew M. Engelhardt, Stony Brook University