Passionately Political: Affective Dimensions of Ideological Self-Identification

• In Event: The Politics of Morality

Abstract

Growing political polarization in the United States has called into question the traditional view that ideological self-identification is a relatively weak social attachment. To test this argument, I compare the use of moral language across different social attachments to measure identity strength. Results across two samples — a dataset of over 40,000 tweets and an experiment using open-ended questions — show that ideology is more strongly associated with affective responses than five other social identities: partisanship, race, religion, sexual orientation and sports affiliation. Moreover, unlike other group identities, ideological extremity is predictive of use of affectively-loaded language. These findings contradict previous theories of political identification by showing that ideological labels are a polarized, relatively strong social identity.

Author

• Lucas de Abreu maia, University of Bristol