In the United States, political affiliation is a strong driver of political behavior, as Huddy and Bankert describe. “Once you’re a member of a group, all kinds of group processes related to social identity kick in.” Motivated reasoning You’re biased toward believing things that reflect positively on your group,” says Federico. You want things to reflect favorably upon your group. “You like members of that group more than others. Social identity theory holds that a person’s self-concept is based on their membership within a group, whether one’s group is defined by a religious affiliation, political party, gender, propensity to support a particular baseball team-or, sometimes, all of the above.Īs soon as you identify as a member of one group or another, it influences how you think about the world. To better understand how that happens, political partisanship is increasingly being studied through the lens of socialidentity theory, as Leonie Huddy, PhD, of Stony Brook University in New York, and Alexa Bankert, PhD, of the University of Georgia, describe in a chapter on the subject (“ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics,” 2017). Though the media arguably turns up the volume on partisan conflict, that doesn’t explain why American voters sort themselves so readily into opposing groups. “They’re making money by energizing polarized audiences,” Jost says. Today, we have partisan cable news networks and clickbait “news” websites that feed off of political disagreement. Then people realized they could cover the news in such a way that they could turn a profit,” says political psychologist John Jost, PhD, co-director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University. “Once there were three networks that saw it as their responsibility to cover the news events in an objective way. Most political researchers agree that the modern media environment has a lot to do with that hostility. “Understanding what goes into that is a major goal in political psychology right now.” “Party identification is a monster that is creating these intense divisions,” says Howard Lavine, PhD, who directs the CSPP. By 2018, 45% of Democrats and 35% of Republicans reported they’d be unhappy if their child did the same, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic (Najle, M., & Jones, M., PRRI, 2019).
In 1960, only 4% of Democrats and 4% of Republicans said they would be disappointed if their child married someone from the opposite political party, according to a study by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (Almond, G., & Verba, S., Civic Culture Study, 1959–60). The general public, too, shows growing antipathy toward those in the opposite political camp. It’s not just politicians fighting across the aisle. Polarization may be the defining feature of American politics in 2019. “What political psychology brings to the table is … understanding individual motivations and how we make sense of this complex world.”īeyond offering insights into the political mind, political psychology can have practical applications such as improving ballot design, designing methodologically sound polls and, possibly, creating a healthier, more civil democracy. “Historically, political science has focused on institutions such as governments or political parties, and how they constrain the behavior of individuals,” says Federico. That insight is one of many from political psychologists who over the past few decades have plumbed the factors behind voter behavior and political identities, helping us understand politics on an individual level.
identify with different political parties.” “It resulted from a long period of evolution in terms of how and why people in the U.S. “Trump’s election was the culmination of a trend, more than some radical unexpected disruption that occurred on November 8, 2016,” Federico says. Trump may have been an anomaly in many ways, it wasn’t the “unexpected asteroid strike” it’s often made out to be, says Christopher Federico, PhD, a political psychologist at the Center for the Study of Political Psychology (CSPP) at the University of Minnesota. presidential election took a lot of people by surprise.
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