Measuring Partisan Social Identity

• In Event: Identity's Role within Partisanship

Abstract

For the last 60 years, partisanship has been considered among the most powerful forces in U.S. public opinion. The canonical explanation for its primacy is that partisanship is a social identity, an enduring psychological attachment to the party as a social group. However, it is increasingly clear that the canonical measure of partisanship is inadequate for capturing it as a social identity. Several alternative measures exist, but there is scant justification for individual measures’ use in relation to other options. We empirically validate a single approach to measuring partisan social identity (PSIM) by collecting essentially every past measure of social identity and applying them to partisanship. We confirm that PSIM is distinct from the traditional ANES measure. Moreover, we show that PSIM is unidimensional and can be efficiently captured with either a 10- or a 4-item measure.

Authors

• Sarah Fioroni, Gallup

• Gavin Ploger, University of Michigan

• Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice, Michigan State University