Western Identity as a Salient Political Identity

• In Event: Politics and Public Opinion in the American West

Abstract

Recent political psychology research has highlighted the salience of place-based identities (e.g., rural consciousness) as important contributors to a range of political attitudes. We examine whether residents in Western States have a shared understanding of their region and the extent to which they identify with their respective states.

We leverage the Western States Survey, a novel dataset of 3,600 respondents living in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada at the time of the 2020 presidential election. This dataset is unique in part because while the five states are broadly part of the same geographic region, the specific political contexts in which respondents live differ significantly, from solidly Democratic to battleground to solidly Republican places. In addition, the dataset includes an oversample of approximately 600 Latino respondents. We measure both peoples’ conceptions of the region they live in and their identification with their state. Our analyses examine the correlates of these identities and whether they are predictors or a range of attitudes that are particularly salient in the region (environmental policy, immigration policy, gun rights policy etc.) Exploring these relationships as they emerged in the 2020 presidential election contest will allow us to better understand the contours of policy attitudes, political identity, and ideology in the American West.

Authors

• Fabian Guy Neuner, Arizona State University

• Christopher F. Karpowitz, Brigham Young University

• Jeremy C. Pope, Brigham Young University