Volume 21, Issue 3

Identity is among of the most common explanations for political outcomes. Despite this, studies of politics often fail to clearly conceptualize or define identity, leading to tremendous variation in the use and application of the concept, much of which is at odds with fundamental tenets of research on the topic. Decades of research in psychology, sociology, and political psychology inform a family of related theories referred to as “Social Identity Theory” (SIT) which demonstrates that identity requires three conditions in order to affect attitudes and behavior: cognitive classification, psychological attachment to the group, and a social context that causes a group identity to become salient. In this paper, we build on these conditions to develop a typology to help identify when and for whom identity should be politically consequential. Using national election data from 2012, 2016 and 2020 we show that failing to differentiate between these concepts, particularly what we call Descriptive and Substantive identity, can lead to mistaken inferences about the behavior of identity groups in politics. Applying insights from SIT also promises to help advance an improved understanding of questions of race, representation, and intersectionality.

The First Amendment guarantees protection for religious exercise in the United States. But for some, the question of who should benefit from these protections seems to hinge on the identity of the religious group seeking these protections. In this article, we explore the extent to which people’s attitudes toward different religious groups affects their support for First Amendment protections as applied to these groups. We also examine whether it is possible to mitigate these effects, asking whether respondents can be primed to consider tolerance when evaluating rights claims, and if so, whether this increases support for rights in general. Our results have important implications for tolerance and rights in a diverse, pluralistic society, and shed light on what the future might hold for public opinion on constitutional rights and liberties.

How does identifying with the Prosperity Gospel or as a Christian Nationalist affect political attitudes? Religion has long been a key factor in explaining public opinion, partisanship, and political ideology, though recently scholars have turned to these two theological worldviews to explain support for Donald Trump, conservative political activism, and political extremism. But these theological identities have varying effects based on race, often cutting against the direct effects of race and religion on politics. Further, while scholars have analyzed these identities on attitudes such as immigration, social/moral policies, and foreign policy, less attention has been paid to the relationship with attitudes toward spending, debt, and the economy. This paper uses two national surveys to connect the Prosperity Gospel and Christian Nationalism with race in predicting economic values and beliefs. In general, both are found to predict economic conservatism, though mostly among whites, while Prosperity Gospel adherence decreases personal economic conservatism. Both theological identities also help to explain agreement with nationalist and populist policies, helping to make sense of the relationship between (white) Christianity and support for Donald Trump.

Using original data collected from YouGov panelists in July of 2021, we examine caregiving experiences and attitudes toward caregiving policies, taking into consideration how intersecting identities shape the perspectives of caregivers. We examine the racial, ethnic and gender dimensions of who provides care, and how the pandemic affected caregiving commitments. We find that communities of color, especially women of color, experienced pandemic caregiving pressures differently than their White counterparts. We further consider public opinion on caregiving policies and explore whether and how these attitudes vary between men and women and across racial, ethnic groups and partisan groups. We find that while interesting differences do exist among different populations, and these differences are worth reflection, policies that support caregivers and caregiving recipients are, on balance, very popular.

Scholars have associated gun culture with liberal individualism, but this is inconsistent with participants’ emphasis on political duty and obligation, the dominance of White men in this space, and the centrality of negative racial and gender priors. I argue that militarism – the valorization of firearms as a sign of good citizenship – is a constitutive part of one dimension of American identity which I call “ascriptive martial republicanism,” which combines the ideal of armed service with White male supremacy. I trace the origins of this conception of Americanism to the American Revolution and the military institutions that developed in the early republic. As a product of the 19th century military establishment, the National Rifle Association (NRA) brought this ideology into the 21st century, long after government abandoned it under pressure from the progressive movements of the 1960s. Through its political and legal advocacy, the group succeeded in making it once again part of the country’s institutional core via Supreme Court decisions. This new institutional regime represents a threat not only to the multicultural ethos but to democratic stability.

Children routinely sit at the center of American culture wars, as parents, officials, and other adults battle over what kids learn in the classroom, which bathrooms they can use, whether they must wear masks or get vaccines, what sports teams they can join, and which schools they can attend. In Democracy’s Child, we describe the crucial reciprocal relationship that exists between children and politics: young people are constituted by their political environs, but liberal democratic politics in turn are shaped and influenced by their young constituents. In this article we ask: what happens when the youngest voices in the most contentious policy battles take the reins – with a specific focus on youth leaders who are challenged by multiple identity-based structural barriers. We train a spotlight on how two youth-led movements – gay straight or gender-sexuality alliances (GSAs) and Dreamers – influenced the rights of LGBTQIA+ people and immigrants amidst opposition from adult adversaries and allies.

Popular culture artifacts are often places and spaces where societal expectations can be exercised, pushed on, prodded, to see how audiences and consumers react, and what they are willing to accept and perhaps what they will not abide. This is one of the prime values of studying popular culture – to see the ways that narratives and characters can provide audiences with paths towards experimentation in their thinking, to reconceptualize ideas and expectations. Much of this is often pegged to different representation, and that is certainly valuable. But the research on narrative and its impact indicates the importance of what is communicated by way of storyline and how this also contributes to the shaping of ideas and conceptions. This essay explores three narrative spaces that demonstrate how popular culture contributes to our thinking about different ideas and dimensions of political life. Imaginaries of women and power, abortion, and the 25th Amendment provide examples of the toggling between real life and fictional presentations. In two of these examples, popular culture has not necessarily provided a space for priming and imagining so much as it has filled in gaps of our general knowledge with misrepresentation and incorrect data, which undermines the value that popular culture can otherwise provide. This is one side of the dynamic. The other side of the dynamic is that we, as citizen audiences, get to try on different ideas and become accustomed to new ways of thinking, which is equally important to consider within politics, and points to the value and importance of popular culture narratives and representations within the body politic.