The Inseparability of Race and Partisanship in the United States
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The Inseparability of Race and Partisanship in the United States Sean J. Westwood1 · Erik Peterson2 Accepted: 29 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Many recent studies consider the overlapping nature of major political identities. Drawing on this research, we posit that partisanship and race are so enmeshed in the public mind that events which independently trigger one of these identities can also activate the other. We find support for this in three behavioral game experiments with 5496 respondents. These studies reveal what we refer to as the “parallel updating” of out-group affect. Shifts in racial affect are accompanied by simultaneous movement in attitudes and behavior towards members of the other political party. Conversely, changes in partisan affect co-occur with movement in views of racial out-groups. Our results speak to the inseparability of racial and partisan affect in the United States and suggest an important link between studies of racial animus and partisan affective polarization. Keywords Polarization · Affect · Social identity Foundational explanations for mass political behavior emphasize social group attachments. The large portion of the public that does not engage with politics on ideological terms can instead rely on others that share their race, class, or religion Replication data and scripts are on the Political Behavior Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/ dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/IXOMN4. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-020-09648-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Sean J. Westwood [email protected] Erik Peterson [email protected] 1
Department of Government at Dartmouth College, 211 Silsby Hall 3 Tuck Mall, Hanover, NH 03755, USA
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Department of Political Science at Texas A & M University, 2010 Allen Building, 4348 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843, USA
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Political Behavior
(Berelson et al. 1954; Lipset 1960; Converse 1964; Conover 1988; Dawson 1994; Achen et al. 2016; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017). From this perspective even political parties draw their relevance from the set of social groups they represent (Campbell et al. 1960; Greene 1999; Green et al. 2002). In an era of elevated out-party hostility, attention has turned towards how the intersection of multiple identities influences partisanship (Mason 2018; Klar 2018; Levendusky 2018). Evidence shows that social sorting—the alignment of an individual’s social group memberships with their party—amplifies partisan affective polarization (Mason 2015; Mason and Wronski 2018; Robison and Moskowitz 2019) and that those who strongly associate the opposing political party with other social outgroups hold more negative views of the other party (Ahler and Sood 2018). Here we extend this research on the consequences of overlapping political identities with a focus on race and partisanship. Many stu
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