Article Summary
Introduction
Affective polarization is high and rising in the U.S., leading to dislike of political others and reducing the effectiveness of government. In order to reduce affective polarization, this study draws on the common in-group identity model from psychology. This suggests that raising the salience of a shared group membership (i.e. “Americans”) rather than competing subgroups (i.e. “Republicans and Democrats”) can reduce intergroup hostility. Specifically, the authors experimentally test whether priming national identity can reduce affective polarization.
Analytical Approach
In the first experimental study, survey participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment (priming the common ingroup identity of American) or control condition.
| Candidate 1 | Candidate 2 | Explanation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dem D+ | Dem D+ | Two Democratic candidates, neither of which have an anti-democratic policy in their platform. | ||
| Dem D- | Dem D+ | Two Democratic candidates, one of which has an anti-democratic policy in their platform. | ||
| Dem D- | Rep D+ | One Democratic candidate with an anti-democratic policy in their platform and one Republican candidate without an anti-democratic policy in their platform. | ||
| Rep D+ | Rep D+ | Two Republican candidates, neither of which have an anti-democratic policy in their platform. | ||
| Rep D- | Rep D- | Two Republican candidates, one of which has an anti-democratic policy in their platform. | ||
| Rep D- | Dem D+ | One Republican candidate with an anti-democratic policy in their platform and one Democratic candidate without an anti-democratic policy in their platform. |
Affective polarization was then measured through feeling thermometers toward both parties and president Obama, trait ratings of both parties (e.g. how “honest” or “mean” they are), and asking participants to list the likes and dislikes about the opposing party.
A second study reduced the treatment condition so that it only included the text prompt for participants to describe why they are proud to be Americans. A third study simply used a treatment condition with the manipulation check questions assessing how strong participants’ American identity was - asking about how American participants felt would be enough to prime American identity.
Finally, the author conducts a study of survey data examining the effect of the American-identity priming holiday July 4th on attitudes toward political others. This naturalistic experiment takes advantage of the random assignment of interview dates across a summer to see if there is reduced dislike of the outparty candidate around July 4th.
Main Findings
Priming American identity significantly reduces affective polarization. It makes people warmer to the out-party by about 5 degrees (on a 100-degree scale), thereby reducing the gap between inparty and outparty ratings. It provides a similar boost in Republicans’ ratings of president Obama (though it did not raise Democrats’ ratings of Obama, suggesting that it is not simply an effect of patriotism broadly, but rather affects feelings towards outgroups specifically.) Interestingly, on both the trait measure and the more open-ended measure of likes and dislikes about the other party, exposure to the American identity prime increased positive attitudes but did not decrease negative attitudes. Counter to expectations, but optimistically for reducing polarization, priming American identity was equally effective regardless of individuals’ initial levels of partisanship and/or ideological alignment. Studies 2 and 3 replicate this pattern, finding smaller but significant increases in warmth toward the outparty.
In the naturalistic experiment, interviewees rated the opposing candidate more positively as a function of how near to July 4th they were interviewed. (This result also replicated when the author looked at ratings within windows of various sizes around July 4th.) This effect did not generalize to the nominee of one’s own party, meaning that exposure to the pro-American identity priming of Independence Day increases warmth toward politically dissimilar others specifically, not support of political candidates generally.
Implications
This work presents compelling evidence that priming a common ingroup of “American” can help decrease some of the animosity between Republicans and Democrats. This provides one important initial route to reducing affective polarization and mitigating its negative effects. It also provides a strong argument for the utility of cross-disciplinary work within the social sciences, and for combining lab experiments with complementary data from outside the lab.
Questions left unanswered
The author discussed one major question, which is whether it is possible to tease apart the effects of priming American identity and raising levels of patriotism. Another question is whether appeals to American identity by politicians are likely to backfire, given their explicit identification with a party. Finally, it may be that the parties (perhaps increasingly) have differing conceptions of what it is to “be American” - as these conceptualizations diverge, what effect might it have on efforts to appeal to a common ingroup identity?
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: No
Did the study rely on proxy variables to measure polarization?: Yes
Only in the naturalistic experiment, the author used feelings toward the presidential nominees for each party as proxies for feelings toward the party.
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
Overall, this is a well-supported argument about the effect of priming the common ingroup identity of “American”. It would have benefited from a stronger effort to differentiate priming American-ness from priming patriotism, perhaps by raising the salience of American identity with a more negative or neutral stimulus.
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
Levendusky, M. S. (2018). Americans, not partisans: Can priming American national identity reduce affective polarization?. The Journal of Politics, 80(1), 59-70.
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@article{levendusky2018americans,
title={Americans, not partisans: Can priming American national identity reduce affective polarization?},
author={Levendusky, Matthew S},
journal={The Journal of Politics},
volume={80},
number={1},
pages={59--70},
year={2018},
publisher={University of Chicago Press Chicago, IL}
}