(iPoster) There Is an American Belief System

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Opinion 2

Abstract

The contours of the American belief system, should such a thing exist, remain elusive. Foundational literature characterizing American political beliefs holds that, while partisanship is a social identity, for most Americans the identity provides little in the way of ideological attitudinal constraint. By contrast, recent scholarship suggests mass partisanship has become fused with other social identities, informing increased binary sorting along ideological and geographic lines. Popular discourse sometimes goes so far as to cast the United States as two narratively distilled nations. We employ an increasingly popular approach to characterizing group belief systems—graphical networks—to interrogate these contrasting understandings of American belief integration, including exploring the possibility of discrete partisan subsystems. Using original survey data linking Americans’ political attitudes and beliefs with orientations toward higher-order social values, we uncover a distinctive constellation of American belief linkages that is neither consistent with low absolute constraint, nor with discrete partitions, partisan or otherwise. Despite evident partisan sorting on attitude propensity, we observe within-partition attitude clustering that is largely statistically consistent across ten different salient American binary identity partitions. We do, however, find a small number of beliefs with statistically-significant differences in betweenness centrality by party. We argue that priming these attitudes has the greatest marginal returns for elites, which appears consistent with elite talking points.

Authors

• Marika Danielle Csapo, Utah State University

• Anthony Michael Bertelli, Pennsylvania State University