A Comprehensive Statistical Modeling on White Americans' Opinion for Muslims

• In Event: Religion, Minorities, and Nationalism in the U.S.

Abstract

Many sociologists and political scientists argue that Trump’s election in 2016 symbolizes the revival of white identity politics because Trump successfully mobilized white Americans who concern about the waning dominance and majority status of white population in the American mainstream society. Anti-Muslim politics is a major feature of the reversed identity politics that leaders of the political movement keep framing Muslims as threat to the American nation. Surprisingly, few published studies have examined how average white Americans’ ingroup identification has impact on their attitudes toward Muslims, especially during the Trump administration.
Extending social identity theory, I argue that the identities that shapes attitudes for Muslims are diverse and complex. Using a well-established statistic model in social science: finite mixture models (FMM), this article seeks to provide a more accurate and comprehensive way of understanding average White Americans’ intergroup attitudes toward Muslims. Using the ANES 2016 time series study and ANES 2018 pilot data, I evaluate two of the most salient and contingent ingroup identities among white Americans in the Muslim politics: racial identity and ethnocultural national identity. The central methodological assumption of FMM is that each model derived from a theory will generate certain observations so that it is well-suited in this case to examine data clustered by independent theories at the same time.
I have four major findings: first, national identity is more relevant in predicting pro-Muslim feelings and racial identity explains variance in anti-Muslim sentiments more. Second, both identities are equally powerful in explaining those who are neutral or tolerant to Muslims. Third, findings also reveal that negative stereotypes against Muslims such as Muslims being violent and disloyal are more sensitive to those who are salient on national identity. Fourth, Republican affiliation, born-again Evangelical belongings, and socio-economic status are three key indicators in predicting with which nationalist model each observation is significantly consistent, in other word, how the sample is grouped by the two identities.

Author

• Ruiqian Li, Baylor University