Social Distance & Stereotypes: Examining Relationships across the Pandemic

• In Event: Interpersonal Networks in Tweets, Conversations, Neighborhoods, and the Pandemic

Abstract

Antipathy between opposing partisans in the United States has been well-documented, as have accompanying concerns about its potential consequences for democratic stability and effective governance. Partisan stereotypes – along with other behaviors – feed into these dynamics, but questions remain about the sources of such things, particularly about the role that social factors may play in their formation. In this paper we look at the relationship between individuals' personal exposure to partisans and several outcomes, most notably their perceptions of what “Democrats” and “Republicans” think about salient issues such as immigration and abortion.

Using aggregate relational data (ARD) batteries placed on different years of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we develop measures of the social distance between individuals and the members of each party based on the associations they form in the communities where they live, work, and join. Because we have access to these batteries in multiple years, we are able to examine – and visualize as two-mode networks – social distance in the American public before and during the pandemic. Likewise, we are able to look at the relationship between social distance and different outcomes prior to and during this (ongoing) crisis.

We find an association between individuals' perceptions of the parties and their social exposure to “the other side,” but we also find an asymmetry in these patterns: among Republican respondents, greater social distance predicts more homogeneous views of both the in-group (Republicans) and the out-group (Democrats), but we observe no such linkages for Democrats. Our analysis provides important perspective on how social and contextual factors help to build and sustain political polarization, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Authors

• Anand Edward Sokhey, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Matthew Pietryka, Florida State University