Political Partisanship as a Social Identity

Huddy, Leonie; Bankert, Alexa

doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.250

Cited by 126 publications

(85 citation statements)

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“…When people identify with a political party, they often develop an enduring emotional attachment to it. 24 This identity leads to favourable views of one's party and intergroup bias, 25 a finding in line with research on group identities. 26 Party attachment makes individuals vulnerable to motivated reasoning.…”

Section: Politics and Cognitive Biassupporting

confidence: 62%

Political Activism and Research Ethics

Jones

2019

J Applied Philosophy

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Those who care about and engage in politics frequently fall victim to cognitive bias. Concerns that such bias impacts scholarship recently have prompted debatesnotably, in philosophy and psychologyon the proper relationship between research and politics. One proposal emerging from these debates is that researchers studying politics have a professional duty to avoid political activism because it risks biasing their work. While sympathetic to the motivations behind this proposal, I suggest several reasons to reject a blanket duty to avoid activism: (1) even if it reduced bias, this duty would make unreasonable demands on researchers;(2) this duty could hinder research by limiting viewpoint diversity; (3) this duty wrongly implies that academia offers a relative haven from bias compared to politics; and (4) not all forms of political activism pose an equal risk of bias. None of these points suggest that researchers should ignore the risk of bias. Rather, researchers should focus on stronger evidence-based strategies for reducing bias than a blanket recommendation to avoid politics.

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Section: Politics and Cognitive Biassupporting

confidence: 62%

Political Activism and Research Ethics

Jones

2019

J Applied Philosophy

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“…Traditional views of partisan identification focus on the issues, ideologies, and groups connected to each party, what Huddy et al (2015; call the instrumental conception of partisanship (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954;Campbell et al 1960;Abramowitz and Saunders 2006). More recently, scholars have conceived of partisanship as a social identity, comparable to race or religion (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002;Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015;Huddy and Bankert 2017;Rothschild et al 2018;Mason and Wronski 2018). In this view, partisan affiliation is akin to a salient social group attachment (Tajfel 1981) and partisanship the result of "comparing a judgment about oneself with one's conception of a social group.…”

Section: Racial Realignment: Conceptions Of Partisanship and Partisanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vote Switching in the 2016 Election: How Racial and Immigration Attitudes, Not Economics, Explain Shifts in White Voting

Reny

Collingwood

Valenzuela

2019

Public Opinion Quarterly

130

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In the aftermath of Donald Trump's 2016 electoral college victory, journalists focused heavily on the white working class (WWC) and the relationship between economic anxiety, racial attitudes, immigration attitudes, and support for Trump. One hypothesized but untested proposition for Donald Trump's success is that his unorthodox candidacy, particularly his rhetoric surrounding economic marginalization and immigration, shifted WWC voters who did not vote Republican in 2012 into his coalition. Using a large national survey we examine 1) whether racial and immigration attitudes or economic dislocation and marginality were the main correlates of vote switching, and; 2) whether this phenomenon was isolated among the white working class. We find a non-trivial number of white voters switched their votes in the 2016 election to Trump or Clinton, that this vote switching was more associated with racial and immigration attitudes than economic factors, and that the phenomena occurred among both working class and non-workingclass whites, though many more working-class whites switched than non-working class whites. Our findings suggest that racial and immigration attitudes may be continuing to sort white voters into new partisan camps and further polarize the parties.

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“…In the United States, an alternative expressive identity approach to partisanship has gained credence. From this perspective, partisanship is a social identity grounded in component gender, religious, and ethnic identities that remains stable even as leaders and platforms change (Huddy & Bankert, ; Huddy & Willmann, ; Mason, ) . Expressive partisanship motivates a defense of the party in the face of challenging information, leads to the vilification of threatening out‐parties, and generates action‐oriented emotions that result in heightened political activity.…”

Section: Instrumental and Expressive Partisanshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressive Versus Instrumental Partisanship in Multiparty European Systems

Huddy

Bankert²,

Davies

2018

Political Psychology

Self Cite

110

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Partisanship has a powerful influence on political behavior in the United States, but its influence is less certain in European democracies. Part of the debate concerning the influence of partisanship in Europe centers on its nature. From one perspective, partisanship is seen as grounded in factors such as ratings of government performance and agreement with the party's issue stances. We refer to this as the instrumental model. In the United States, however, a competing model has gained empirical support in which partisanship is defined as an identity that is largely defensive in nature and not especially reactive to ongoing events. We refer to this as an expressive model. In this review, we focus on several European democracies (the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Sweden, and Italy) and evaluate evidence for and against an expressive model of partisanship in which democratic citizens act to defend their party in order to maintain its positive standing. We find evidence that strong partisans in Europe exhibit five characteristics of expressive partisans: stable partisan identity, motivated reasoning in defense of the party, the greater influence of identity than issues and ideology in shaping vote choice and political behavior, affective polarization bias in favor of one's own party, and the existence of strong defensive emotions aroused by partisan threats and reassurances. It appears that partisans in the four European democracies act in similar ways to partisans in the United States. Nonetheless, levels of partisan identification differ across the European nations and between European nations and the United States helping to explain national differences in the intensity of partisan behavior.

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Political Partisanship as a Social Identity

Cited by 126 publications

References 0 publications

Political Activism and Research Ethics

Political Activism and Research Ethics

Vote Switching in the 2016 Election: How Racial and Immigration Attitudes, Not Economics, Explain Shifts in White Voting

Expressive Versus Instrumental Partisanship in Multiparty European Systems

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