The Power and Influence of Political Identities Beyond Political Contexts
20 Pages Posted: 27 Aug 2013
Date Written: 2013
Abstract
Scholarship in identity politics looks at the general social identity formation process, asks how social identities become politicized, and then examines the consequences for political attitudes and behaviors of social identity politicization. While party identification scholarship considers what identification with a party consists of and its impact on numerous political factors, these two scholarly traditions rarely interface. This is surprising given that both share the goal of explaining the causes and consequences of political identification. In this paper, we examine the impact of political identity on non-political attitudes. We do so through the analysis of two independent surveys that both included similar list experiments. We find relatively strong evidence that political identities influence non-political attitudes, though that effect does not appear to be linearly related to the strength of one’s own political identity.
Keywords: Social identity; Identity politics; Party identification; Ideology; List Experiments
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