Extreme party animals: Effects of political identification and ideological extremity

Abstract

Many Americans’ political identity is more relevant, salient, and central than their American identity. Political parties provide party members with an identity and belief system. Political identities influence identity‐based ideologies which increase affective polarization and potential anti‐social intergroup conflict between political parties. The purpose of the current research is to determine how political party identification and ideological extremity influences affective polarization for Republicans and Democrats across two studies. Participants in both studies completed a survey which measured political identification, ideological extremity, and uniquely operationalized measures of affective polarization, including support for co‐partisans, attitudes about political rivals, emotions towards political rivals, action tendencies towards political rivals, and perceived threat from political rivals. Study 1 (N = 530) used responses to the survey from a convenience sample crowdsourced by Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) in 2018. Study 1 showed that higher political party identification is associated with significantly higher affective polarization for members of both parties and that ideological extremity partially mediates this effect. Study 2 (N = 260) used a 2020 AMT sample to replicate Study 1’s results. Findings extend our understanding of identity‐based ideological extremity and suggest that affective polarization could be driven by political party identification and partisans’ ideological extremity.

Social identity processes predicting post‐election 2020 ideological extremism

“…As expected, there was no main effect for any predictor on the post-election ideological extremism outcome (Table 2). Our results support a social identity perspective regarding ideological extremism: the more people identify with a group, the more they become susceptible to extreme beliefs when their group considers these beliefs as group norms (e.g., Brown & Hohman, 2022;Iyengar & Westwood, 2014;Mason, 2018). Most importantly, our study expands on the findings that extreme Democrats and Republicans generally display affective extremism rather than ideological extremism (Mason, 2018).…”

Information Integration Technology Boosts Informationalized Teaching of Ideological and Political Courses in Colleges and Universities

“…Brown, J. K., et al delved deeper into the influence of the ruling party's identity and ideology on the sentiments of the two political parties within the country and, from the study, found Constructive solutions. An empirical analysis experiment was designed, where the identity of the ruling party was significantly correlated to the emotional polarization of the two parties, but the emergence of ideology slowed down the emergence of extremism [14].…”

Characterization of Red Civic Education in Colleges and Universities under Big Data Platform and Optimization of Teaching Methods

“…Using big data analysis technology, students' learning progress and understanding can be monitored in real-time, and problems can be found and intervened in time, etc. [9][10][11][12]. The optimization of teaching methods can be based on data analysis, and teachers can implement personalized teaching strategies for the learning characteristics and needs of different students and use the interactive function of the big data platform to increase teacher-student interaction and student-to-student discussion and improve student participation and interest [13][14][15].…”

“…Rong Pan. Applied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences, 9(1) (2024)[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] …”