Article Summary
Introduction
Despite an increased level of partisan and ideological sorting, the terms “liberal” and “Democrat”, or “conservative” and “Republican” are still not perfectly intertwined. Plenty of public rhetoric vilifies liberals and conservatives akin to the rhetoric used to vilify Democrats and Republicans. In such cases, the label “liberal” and “conservative” is treated more like an identity group rather than a set of coherent issue positions. The focus of this study is on the ideological divide among Americans as an identity. The paper seeks to learn what liberals and conservatives dislike about one another – issue positions (issue-based ideology) or identity (identity-based ideology)? To address this question, the author presents a rationale for how ideology can be seen as both a set of coherent issues and as a social identity. The author argues that the identity framework for viewing ideology is perhaps more powerful in shaping attitudes about people with the opposing ideology given everything we know about how Democrats and Republicans feel about one another. Such partisan animosity, built from identity to one’s party, can also translate to increased affective polarization between ideological groups regardless of how someone feels about the issues.
Methods
To answer the research question, the author gathers data using a survey fielded with Survey Sampling International (SSI). To assess identity with an ideology, respondents answered four questions: (1) How important is being a [Identity] to you? (2) How well does the term [Identity] describe you? (3) When talking about [identity], how often do you use “we” instead of “they”? (4) To what extent do you think of yourself as being a [identity]? In each of the questions, [identity] is either Liberal or Conservative. To assess issue positions that reflect liberal/conservative ideology, respondents are asked to indicate their opinions on six issues including immigration, the Affordable Care Act, abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control and the relative importance of reducing the tax deficit or unemployment. Here, high “issue-based ideology” is relative consistency of issue positions with what is typically on the liberal or conservative side of the issue. This score is generated by taking the percentage of issue positions that concur with left wing stances and the percentage with right wing stances and subtracting the two. Finally, to measure ideological polarization, respondents were asked to indicate how likely they are to marry someone from the opposite ideological group, move in next to them, spend time with them, or become friends with them.
To validate these findings, the author also uses the 2016 American National Elections Study (ANES) and assesses identity-based ideology using the 7-point self-identified liberal-conservative scale. To assess polarization, feeling thermometers – asking participants to share their feeling of the target group on a scale of 0 (cold) to 100 (warm) – were used. Issue-based ideology was defined in a similar fashion as the previous study and the samples are generally comparable between one another.
Main Findings
Social identity is a powerful predictor of attitudes towards the opposing ideological group, and it is perhaps more influential than issue-based ideology. First, many Americans do not have consistent issue attitudes with the liberal or conservative wing of American politics. As one becomes more strongly identified with their ideology group, it leads to a 30-percentage point increase in desires for marrying someone of the same ideology, 16 percentage point increase for desire to become friends, 11 percentage point increase for spending social time, and 13 percentage point increase for desire to move next door with someone of the same ideology. These results are also replicated with the ANES data such that stronger identity-based ideology leads to an average of 28 degree increase in feelings towards someone of the same ideological group.
Furthermore, the author also examines the role of issue consistency with an ideological group on desires to marry, become friends, spend time, or move in next door. The results suggest that even when issue positions are consistent with the ideological group, identity with that group can still have significant effects on feelings towards the ideological opponent. For example, among those who have most consistently left leaning political views, having a stronger liberal identity increases desires to stay away from ideological opponents (social distance) by 20 percentage points. Similarly, for conservatives, among those with the most right-wing views, having stronger conservative identity increases social distance by 15 percentage points.
This paper tells us many things about political ideology. First, few liberals and conservatives express political viewpoints that are completely in line with those typical of the ideological group in which they identify. Second, social identity with an ideological group is often enough to predict attitudes towards the opposing ideological group. Even if individuals were consistent in viewpoints, their identity with the group is the greater driver of attitudes towards the outgroup and desires to spend time with people from their own side versus the opponent. Thus, this collectively suggests that liberals and conservatives do conceptualize their ideology as an identity and use this to determine who is “us” and who is “them”.
Questions Left Unanswered
The author suggests that future work should test how ideology, as a social identity, can drive political behavior, especially turning out to vote in an election. In this paper, the author finds that identity-based ideology predicts warmth towards the opposing ideological position and that this is enough to drive these feelings. Issue positions, on the other hand, do not affect feelings towards people of the opposing ideological group as much. Therefore, the next question now becomes whether people can mobilize on these feelings. If a Get Out the Vote campaign or a candidate were to use rhetoric to mobilize voters on ideological identity grounds, would it work to increase turnout?
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: No
Did the study rely on proxy variables to measure polarization?: No
The feeling thermometer was the proxy measure in this case. The author was interested in social distancing (intent to marry someone from the opposing party, move in next to someone from the opposing party, or become friends with someone from the opposing party). These items were included in the survey fielded via Survey Samples International (SSI) but were not in the ANES, which meant that they had to use the feeling thermometer as the proxy for social distancing rather than their preferred three items.
Were standard p-value thresholds used (p<.05 or 95% Confidence Intervals that don’t overlap zero)?: Yes
- Largest p-value presented as significant: 0.05
Were correlational results interpreted with causal language?: No
Limitations / Weaknesses
This paper demonstrates that people use their own political ideology labels to be more of a social identity, rather than a coherent set of issues positions, and this can translate to affective ideological polarization. Just as partisanship separates people into two camps based on their identity to a political party, ideology has the same effect. However, this project is not without weaknesses and while the author does not directly point them out in the paper, the most obvious is in the sample size and comparability of the two samples. In the paper, the author uses descriptive statistics to show how the samples are balanced in demographic distributions. However, the sample from Survey Sampling International contains more Democrats (61%) than Republicans (37%). The ANES was included as another analysis to supplement these survey data, but the author acknowledges that the ANES measures are not ideal. This communicates to the reader that, perhaps, there is a need for a larger, more representative sample, for the ideal measures that the author is interested in. While their findings lead to the same conclusion, it would be better if they used a larger sample, or at least something that is more balanced in partisanship, for their analyses with the ideal measure of social identity and desires to interact with someone from the opposing ideological position. For future research with affective ideological or partisan polarization, it is best that the samples are balanced on the most important criteria – in this case partisanship or ideology – so that the results can be drawn to better reflect the population, rather than based on mostly liberal or conservative responses.
Open Data & Analyses
Does the article make the replication data publicly available?: No
Does the article make the replication analysis scripts publicly available?: No
Article Citation
Mason, L. (2018). Ideologues without issues: The polarizing consequences of ideological identities. Public Opinion Quarterly, 82(S1), 866-887.
Bibtex
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@article{mason2018ideologues,
title={Ideologues without issues: The polarizing consequences of ideological identities},
author={Mason, Lilliana},
journal={Public Opinion Quarterly},
volume={82},
number={S1},
pages={866--887},
year={2018},
publisher={Oxford University Press US}
}