Identity as Dependent Variable: How Americans Shift Their Identities to Align with Their Politics PDF

Identity as Dependent Variable: How Americans Shift Their Identities to Align with Their Politics Patrick J. Egan New York University Abstract: Political science generally treats identities such as ethnicity, religion, and sexuality as “unmoved movers” in the chain of causality. I hypothesize that t...

Identity as Dependent Variable: How Americans Shift Their Identities to Align with Their Politics Patrick J. Egan New York University Abstract: Political science generally treats identities such as ethnicity, religion, and sexuality as “unmoved movers” in the chain of causality. I hypothesize that the growing salience of partisanship and ideology as social identities in the United States, combined with the increasing demographic distinctiveness of the nation’s two political coalitions, is leading some Americans to engage in a self-categorization and depersonalization process in which they shift their identities toward the demographic prototypes of their political groups. Analyses of a representative panel data set that tracks identities and political affiliations over a 4-year span confirm that small but significant shares of Americans engage in identity switching regarding ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and class that is predicted by partisanship and ideology in their pasts, bringing their identities into alignment with their politics. These findings enrich and complicate our understanding of the relationship between identity and politics and suggest caution in treating identities as unchanging phenomena. Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Y82RW8. I n recent years, identity has emerged as a key explanatory variable in both academic and popular accounts of U.S. politics. The shift was reinforced by the 2016 presidential election, which revealed an American electorate deeply divided along the lines of identity dimensions like race, Latino origin, religion, and sexual orientation. Many political scientists now point to group identity as a key independent variable predicting political behavior (e.g., Abdelal et al. 2006; Achen and Bartels 2016; Huddy 2003; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017), returning full circle to the focus placed on identity by some of the earliest academic accounts of voting and attitudes (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960). In political science, it is often implicitly assumed that identities are stable and therefore can be confidently considered to be antecedent to political attitudes and behavior. But recent empirical work has challenged the premise that identities are exogenous to politics. These findings have been most pronounced in the religion and politics literature, where analyses of U.S. panel data demonstrate short-term change in Americans’ religious identification and participation in response to their partisanship and ideology (Campbell et al. 2018; Djupe, Neiheisel, and Sokhey 2018; Hout and Fischer 2014; Margolis 2018a, 2018b; Patrikios 2008; Putnam and Campbell 2010). Other research has found that politically salient factors in Americans’ backgrounds and upbringing are long-term predictors of their present identities with regard to race (Davenport 2016) and sexual orientation (Egan 2012), indicating that these identities too can be endogenous to politics. Previous work has looked at identities one category at a time, and thus the mechanisms of politicized identity change provided by researchers have largely been grounded in aspects of particular identity categories being studied. Here, I use social identity theory, offered by a few scholars to explain the effect of politics on religion (Campbell et al. 2018; Patrikios 2008), to hypothesize more broadly about how politics can lead Americans to shift their identities across multiple categories that we typically think of as fixed. I begin with the well-documented fact that for more and more Americans, politics has Patrick J. Egan is Associate Professor, Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, 19 West 4th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012 ([email protected]). I thank Doug Arnold, Neal Beck, Kanchan Chandra, Mike Hout, Karen Jusko, Porey Lin, Katie McCabe, Gwyneth McClendon, Tali Mendelberg, Megan Mullin, Markus Prior, Katelyn Stauffer, Stephanie Zonszein; participants at the APSA, MPSA, New York Area Political Psychology, and Toronto Political Behaviour Workshop meetings; and audiences at the Juan March Institute and NYU Abu Dhabi for helpful comments on this article. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 00, No. 00, xxxx 2019, Pp. 1–18  C 2019, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12496 1 2 become key to the self-concept, leading “Democrat” and “Republican” as well as “liberal” and “conservative” to become identities in themselves that are meaningful far beyond shared policy preferences (Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015; Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012; Mason 2018a, 2018b). Social identity theory tells us that highly salient identities can provide a definition of the self in terms of the defining characteristics of the identity group. Through a process called self-categorization, these characteristics are woven together into prototypes that become stylized representations of the kinds of persons who belong to the identity group (Turner 1985; Turner et al. 1987). When the identity becomes salient, identifiers can engage in a depersonalization process in which beliefs and actions converge toward those of prototypical group members (Hogg, Terry, and White 1995). A concurrent development in U.S. politics is supplying a readily accessible source of content for these prototypes. In a “social sorting” process, as documented by Lilliana Mason (2016, 2018b), the nation’s two political coalitions are now quite distinct demographic groups with regard to characteristics like race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality. Liberal Democrats are increasingly more likely to be people of color, sexual minorities, and nonreligious; conservative Republicans are likely to be nonHispanic whites, heterosexuals, and religious. Social sorting is evident at both mass and elite levels, making it easy for Americans to call these prototypes to mind (Ahler and Sood 2018). I hypothesize that these conditions are leading some Americans to adjust their demographic identities to better align with partisan and ideological prototypes. I explore this hypothesis using data collected by the General Social Survey (GSS) in three panel studies it conducted between 2006 and 2014. In these nationally representative surveys, questions about a range of identities were asked of empaneled respondents three times over a 4-year period. I find that during this span, substantial numbers of Americans shifted in and out of identities associated with ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and class. Furthermore, I show that small but significant shares of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans shifted these identities in ways that conform with political group prototypes. Conservative Republicans were more likely than liberal Democrats to shift into identification as born-again Christian and Protestant, and with national origins associated with being non-Hispanic white. Liberal Democrats were more likely than conservative Republicans to shift into identification as lesbian, gay, or bisexual; having no religion; and being of Latino origin. Each of these shifts brought liberal Democrats’ and conservative Republicans’ identities into better alignment with PATRICK J. EGAN the identity groups that currently make up the two U.S. political coalitions. These shifts were more pronounced among Americans who maintained consistent party and ideological identifications over the 4-year period. Additional analyses indicate that politics plays a particularly important role in identification with two groups for which identity is typically acquired later in life, rather than transmitted across generations—lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, and those identifying as having no religious affiliation— in that the impact of politics on identity is large for these groups relative to their current prevalence in the population. These findings demonstrate that in the United States, the range of identity categories subject to override by partisanship and ideology is much wider than shown in previous research, where the most compelling findings thus far have focused on the relationship between politics and religious identity. The scope of politicized identity shifting also includes ethnicity, sexuality, and class, which until now have not been shown to be subject to short-term change that aligns with individual political characteristics. The analysis suggests that circumstances are favorable for a similar process to take place in other contexts when the two conditions currently the case in the United States hold elsewhere: Political groups take on the qualities of identities and political groups become demographically distinct. All told, these discoveries have important consequences for our understanding of the formation and maintenance of identity groups and how political scientists model the relationship between identity and other political phenomena. Identities and Identity Change A straightforward definition of “identity” is a social category into which people are placed based upon one or more individual attributes. Attributes are mapped to identities according to membership rules that say which attributes are necessary for membership in the identity. Many important attributes are either impossible to change (e.g., place of birth, ancestry of parents, and sexual attraction) or very hard to change (e.g., gender, skin tone, and other physical attributes) and for most purposes can be considered fixed. Another set of attributes can change but typically do so slowly, such as language, religion, and socioeconomic status; they are “sticky” (Chandra 2012). Fixed and sticky attributes are necessary for membership in many of the most highly salient identity categories in American politics, such as race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, and class, which leads to the 3 IDENTITY AS DEPENDENT VARIABLE implicit assumptions that these identities are unchanging and can be considered unmoved movers in models of political behavior. However, for two reasons, caution is called for in assuming identities like these do not change over time. The first concern arises from the distinction between objective group membership and subjective group identification. In contrast to mere group members, group identifiers have a “subjective, or internalized sense of belonging to the group” (Huddy 2003, 513–14). Whereas group membership is in many cases straightforward, group identification, by contrast, can be up to a fair amount of individual discretion. Because for some the strength of subjective identification can shift over time, claimed identities can change as well. The second concern is that many people have attributes that place them near the boundaries that demarcate one identity from another, and these boundaries tend to be fuzzy (Chandra 2006, 2012). Examples include those born to parents of different races or religions, those attracted to both sexes, or those who are subject to a change in economic status. The ethnic, religious, sexuality, and class identities claimed at any given time by those located near these boundaries reflect the extent to which they identify more strongly with one side of the divide than the other. This too can change over time, as people have new experiences and encounter new contexts. Taken together, these two observations suggest that shifts in identities typically considered fixed may not be an entirely rare phenomenon. When Politics Makes Identity a Dependent Variable Many identity shifts have political causes, as demonstrated by a wealth of evidence from the United States and around the world. For example, scholars of comparative politics have shown that individuals’ subjective ethnic identities and their salience can be shaped by political institutions such as electoral rules (Posner 2005) and government census categories (Nobles 2000). Analyses of U.S. survey data confirm that many contemporary American identities are endogenous to politics. Work on this topic has been particularly advanced in the the religion and politics field, where scholars have employed surveys—and, particularly, panel designs—to document how politics affects religious identity and participation. This research finds Democrats and liberals switching into identification as nonreligious (Campbell et al. 2018; Hout and Fischer 2002, 2014; Margolis 2018a, 2018b; Putnam and Campbell 2010) and claiming an affirmatively secular identity (Campbell et al. 2018). It also shows how political disagreement causes Americans to attend religious services less frequently (Margolis 2018a, 2018b; Patrikios 2008) and leave their houses of worship (Djupe, Neiheisel, and Sokhey 2018). Other survey research has documented how racial and sexual identities are affected by politics, although here the focus thus far has been on longer-term processes. Davenport (2016) finds that when Americans are of mixed-race parentage, their own racial and ethnic identification is strongly shaped by politically salient, causally prior characteristics like gender, religion of upbringing, and parents’ socioeconomic status. Egan (2012) shows that the likelihood of coming out as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) is significantly affected by characteristics of one’s upbringing that are causes of political attitudes, meaning that a substantial proportion of LGBs’ distinctively liberal political attitudes can be attributed to selection effects. The mechanisms offered for how religious, racial, and sexual identities are shaped by politics tend to be grounded in particular aspects of the identity being studied, such as the overlap in timing of religious and political socialization processes (Margolis 2018a), the reinforcement of ethnic categoies by gender and socioeconomic status (Davenport 2016), and the strong correlation between liberal political views and acceptance of sexual minorities (Egan 2012). The mechanisms most similar to the explanation developed here focus on the norms associated with partisanship and ideology as social identities. Patrikios (2008) argues that self-categorization processes associated with partisanship and ideology result in group norms that affect evangelicals’ levels of church attendance. Campbell et al. (2018) show that the dissonance between group norms and identity for Democrats becomes pronounced when the association between the GOP and religion is made salient in an experimental context, leading them to make immediate shifts toward nonreligious identification. Here, I extend these social identity theory explanations to offer the first comprehensive account for why shifts across multiple identity categories can be predicted by political and ideological orientations. Partisanship and Ideology as Social Identities Amid the wave of polarization that characterizes U.S. politics in our current era, “Republican” and “Democrat,” as well as “liberal” and “conservative,” have become more than just bundles of policy preferences. They are also increasingly taking on the qualities of social identities. 4 Of course, many scholars have long considered partisanship to be an identity deriving meaning in part from the parties’ associations with particular social groups (e.g., Campbell et al. 1960; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002). But recent work shows that partisanship and ideology have become even more central for many Americans, as indicated by the degree to which they engage in social distancing, a hallmark characteristic of strong social identities (Tajfel and Turner 1979). Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans prefer to be friends with, date, marry, work and do business with, and be neighbors with their own group (Devine 2015; Huber and Malhotra 2017; Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015; Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012; Iyengar and Westwood 2015; Klofstad, McDermott, and Hatemi 2012; Malka and Lelkes 2010; Mason 2018a; McConnell et al. 2018). One of the ways social identities become integrated into the self-concept is through self-categorization and depersonalization, a process by which group identifiers come to perceive themselves as similar to the prototypical identity group member and adopt beliefs and behaviors that conform to the prototype (Turner 1985; Turner et al. 1987). This process can develop among members of groups both large and small. When group identity is salient, conforming to the prototype makes individuals better liked and more popular with other ingroup members (Hogg and Terry 2000). Self-categorization and depersonalization thus play an important role in generating and sustaining ingroup cohesion and loyalty. Rich material is provided for the construction of political prototypes by the fact that the demographics of Democrats and Republicans, as well as liberals and conservatives, now differ substantially on these identity categories. Lilliana Mason documents a “social sorting” process in which party identifiers have become increasingly distinct with regard to characteristics such as race and church attendance, as well as the extent to which they feel “close to” people of different demographic groups in their party coalitions (2018b). Social sorting is reflected in Table 1a, where data from the 2016 American National Election Studies (ANES) show that non-Hispanic whites and born-again Christians make up substantially greater shares of Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and liberals. By contrast, people of color (in particular, blacks and Latinos), LGBs, Jews, and those who claim no religious affiliation make up greater shares of Democrats and liberals than Republicans and conservatives. The final column of Table 1a reports each identity’s dissimilarity index score. A widely used measure of residential segregation, here the score indicates the share of Americans claiming the identity who would have to switch political affiliations in order for the identity group PATRICK J. EGAN to be equally split between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. I have signed the score negative for identities overrepresented among liberal Democrats and positive for those overrepresented among conservative Republicans.1 Elected officials further substantiate these prototypes, as shown by the demographic differences between the parties’ members of Congress displayed in Table 1b. Differences are most pronounced between the Freedom Caucus and Progressive Caucus, composed of, respectively, the most conservative Republicans and the most liberal Democrats in the House. Thus, at both elite and mass levels, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans present Americans with highly divergent prototypes along the lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. Recent research indicates that Americans are not only aware of these demographic differences between the two political camps, but also that they exaggerate them in their minds (Ahler and Sood 2018). Here, I investigate the claim that as partisanship and ideology have become important social identities in U.S. politics, self-categorization and depersonalization lead some people to adopt identities that conform with these prototypes and to shed identities that do not. Data Data come from the General Social Survey (GSS), the biennial study of Americans’ attitudes and behavior conducted by the National Opinion Research Center. The GSS uses cluster-based sampling to obtain nationally representative samples of noninstitutionalized adults in the United States. In the 2006, 2008, and 2010 GSS, respondents were empaneled to be reinterviewed twice over the next 4 years, creating three three-wave panels (Smith and Schapiro 2017). Interviews of the first panel took place in 2006, 2008, and 2010; the second panel in 2008, 2010, and 2012; and the third panel in 2010, 2012, and 2014. I pool the three panels by wave of interview. At the center of the analyses in this article are data derived from questions asked in multiple waves about respondents’ identities with regard to race, ethnicity and national origin, religion, class, sexuality, and partisanship and ideology. Each identity category was scored dichotomously, taking on the value of 1 if the identity was claimed 1 For any identity group j , the magnitude of the dissimilarity index score is calculated as 12 (| LD∩J − LD∩∼J | + | CR∩J − CR∩∼J |), J ∼J J ∼J where J and ∼ J are the shares of the population who do and do not identify as a j , and L D and C R are the shares of the population identifying, respectively, as liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. 5 IDENTITY AS DEPENDENT VARIABLE TABLE 1 Sources of Partisan and Ideological Prototypes in U.S. Politics (a) Demographic Characteristics of Partisan and Ideological Groups, 2016 ANES (%) Identity Democrats Republicans Liberals Conservatives Liberal Dems. Conserv. Dissimilarity Reps. Index White, not Hispanic Black, not Hispanic Asian/Pacific, not Hispanic Native, not Hispanic Other, not Hispanic Hispanic 57.0 19.0 3.2 0.7 4.2 15.3 84.3 1.8 2.6 0.5 3.4 6.7 66.2 12.3 3.6 0.7 3.7 13.0 75.6 7.1 2.8 0.4 3.8 9.7 65.3 13.4 3.6 0.6 3.4 13.1 85.4 1.2 2.5 0.6 3.6 6.3 0.28 −0.49 −0.10 −0.02 0.02 −0.20 Protestant Catholic Jewish Born-again Christian Agnostic, atheist, secular, none 18.6 22.2 2.7 27.7 28.3 37.3 22.4 1.2 44.6 13.9 19.4 19.4 3.9 19.9 31.9 34.4 23.1 0.8 45.4 15.2 20.2 20.5 4.4 18.3 33.0 41.7 22.7 0.9 47.1 13.0 0.25 0.03 −0.36 0.32 −0.29 8.5 2.1 11.9 2.3 11.4 1.4 −0.45 9.6 38.7 47.4 4.3 5.4 38.2 52.4 3.9 6.3 34.8 52.7 6.2 7.8 38.6 50.4 3.2 5.6 31.2 56.5 6.7 4.5 35.8 55.4 4.3 −0.06 0.05 −0.01 −0.12 Lesbian, gay, bisexual Lower class Working class Middle class Upper class (b) Demographic Characteristics of U.S. House of Representatives, 2015 (%) Identity Democrats Republicans Progressive Caucus Freedom Caucus White, not Hispanic Black, not Hispanic Asian/Pacific, not Hispanic Native American, not Hispanic Hispanic 59.3 22.8 5.3 0.0 12.7 94.8 0.8 0.0 0.8 3.6 47.6 36.5 4.8 0.0 11.1 94.3 0.0 0.0 0.0 5.7 Protestant Roman Catholic Jewish Religion: not specified 45.0 36.5 9.5 5.3 66.0 29.2 0.4 0.0 44.4 31.7 12.7 6.3 62.9 28.6 0.0 0.0 3.2 0.0 6.3 0.0 11.6 31.8 16.1 4.4 15.2 13.5 Openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual Ever had working-class job∗ From working-class background∗ Net worth