Affect and Belief System: Tracking the Historical Interplay of Emotions, Identities, and Opinions

• In Event: 30260 - Joint Roundtables: Section on Social Psychology and Section on Sociology of Emotions
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Networks and Mathematical Social Psychology

Abstract

This paper aims to understand better how partisan and social identities align with political attitudes about social issues and rising hostility across various social groups in American politics. Three key foci arise to do this: affects, stability, and heterogeneity. Affects refer to the potential emotional components of belief systems, stability concerns the variability of belief systems over time, and heterogeneity addresses the social foundations of belief systems across different social groups. Each element is not a new research question but rather a classic one. However, an attempt to encompass these elements within an integrative theoretical framework — beyond separately dealing with such individual relationships with political beliefs — is recent and rare in an empirical sense. This research employs a relational approach to investigate the trajectory of historical shifts in the configuration of various affective dimensions, social identities, and issue positions.
This study draws on data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) from 1984 to 2024, which, to the author’s knowledge, is the most comprehensive dataset available. Using belief network analysis, this study aims to uncover relational patterns in the multiple correlations between social identities, policy preferences, and affects toward political elites and social groups, in order to identify changes in the belief system. In traditional network analysis, nodes represent individuals, and links represent their interactions. In contrast, belief network analysis conceptualizes a belief system where individual attitudes serve as nodes and the correlations between these attitudes as links, allowing for the identification of a political schema characterized by shared political attitudes (Boutyline and Vaisey 2017). In so doing, the analysis is expected to map individual attitudes, illustrating how schematic patterns emerge in the polarized era.

Author

• Duhui Lee, Rutgers University-New Brunswick