Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity

“In this sense, protesting is similar to voting (Mason, 2018).”

“Of course, another common cause of negotiation failure is polarized partisanship (Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012; Mason, 2018).”

“Significantly for this project, partisanship shapes how we feel towards groups in the electorate, especially individuals with a different party label (Iyengar et al., 2012; Iyengar & Westwood, 2015; Mason, 2018).”

“Given that politics is aligned with religious, social, cultural, racial, and economic identities, people have much at stake when they disagree (Mason, 2018).”

“An additive scale of strong partisanship, strong ideology, race, religion, and tea party membership, modeled after Mason (2018).”

“1121 1 3 Political Behavior (2022) 44:1105–1124 In addition, contemporary research has acknowledged the importance of viewing partisanship as a social identity and testing its influence against other identities (Mason 2018).”

“…shown to drive these effects (Frank & Gilovich, 1988), and scholars suggest that people can form identities around ideologies and opinion-based groups (Devine, 2015; Malka & Lelkes, 2010; Mason, 2018b) that are just as potent as partisanship in generating intergroup biases (McGarty et al., 2009).”

“…attitudes are becoming bimodal or moving toward extremes (Baldassari and Park 2020; Park 2018; Perry 2022), it is undeniable that Americans are becoming more asymmetrically “sorted” along ideological, racial, and partisan identities (Grossman and Hopkins 2016; Hacker and Pierson 2020; Mason 2018).”

“Most Democratic and Republican voters even now have cold feelings toward fellow citizens of the other party, reflecting affective polarization (Mason 2018; Iyengar et al.”

“The link between SDO and support for COVID-19 measures was stronger among Americans (vs. Canadians), perhaps attributable to the larger political divide in the US (Mason, 2018).”

“Despite concerns over growing (or perceived) political polarization (Mason, 2018), it remains unclear whether political polarization, particularly on the right, might be linked to the loss of local news.”

“This is consistent with recent work that has demonstrated powerfully that political party identification is a consequential social identity (Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015; Iyengar and Westwood 2015; Mason 2018).”

“First published online: January 17, 2022. grounded in ideology and policy positions as opposed to partisanship and group affinity (Achen and Bartels 2017; Dawson 1995; Goggin and Theodoridis 2018; Iyengar et al. 2019; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017; Lee 2010; Mason 2018; Sniderman and Stiglitz 2012).”

“…hostility and distrust, including economic conditions (Stewart et al., 2020), elite policy disputes (Rogowski & Sutherland., 2016), government performance (Reiljan, 2020), partisan media (Levendusky, 2013), and the overlap of citizens’ partisan and social identities (Harteveld, 2021b; Mason, 2018).”

“A more populist party politics centered around racial and ethnic identity will likely deepen these challenges (Mason 2018) and thereby degrade the performance of American governing institutions.”

“This claim is backed up by decades of research in social identity theory (e.g. Green et al., 2002; Huddy, 2001; Kelly, 1988; Mason, 2018) and cognitive psychology (Ditto et al., 2009; Kunda, 1990; Lodge and Taber, 2013; Lord et al., 1979; Tavris and Aronson, 2008).”

“Particularly if political leaders evoke and organize such sentiments into politics, they may engender social polarization and “ us ” versus “ them ” politics (Abramowitz 2018; Mason 2018; McCoy and Somer 2019).”

“The divide is reinforced by the zero-sum nature of the two-party system, whereby partisanship assimilates highly correlated sets of opposing positions on a wide range of issues (Klein, 2020; Mason, 2018), and by elites ’ strategic activation of place-based issues and identities.”

“…polarization going back to Converse (1964) and revitalized most recently by Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope (2005), McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2016), Hetherington and Weiler (2018), and Mason (2018) among others.1 We contribute to this discussion using evidence from recent behavioral experiments.”

“This is in line with the trend of negative partisanship in American politics (Mason, 2018).”

“…behind costly political identity expression is valuable and timely, as it may elucidate the observation that individuals with different political identities have become more resistant to compromise over policy (Davis 2018), while policy differences have only increased marginally (Mason 2018a).”

“1960; Mason 2018), group-based perceptions are important mediators of political attachments.”

“Often attributed to increases in political polarization (Iyengar et al. 2019; Mason 2018), the strength of partisanship is now so socially and politically consequential in the US that, in the words of a recent study, “it is difficult to overstate the importance of party loyalty” (Barber and Pope…”

“In line with other recent work on voters and affective polarization (Mason, 2018; Svolik 2019; Iyengar et al., 2019; Nalepa et al., 2018), we document that among Turkey’s pro-government and opposition voters alike, it is those who feel more socially distant to the other side that are more…”

“Moreover, the present study argues that López Obrador’s victory was driven by affective polarization (hypothesis 4) (Iyengar et al., 2012; Mason, 2018), which was exacerbated by his candidacy when relying on an “us against them” rhetoric, positioning himself against the political establishment.”

“Given that our study focuses on electoral behavior during a period of extreme partisan polarization among elites (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2016) and the public (Mason 2018), it is important to consider the relationship between race and partisanship for White Americans.”

“…and perhaps immovable partisan and ideological positions also impede clear-eyed policy evaluation, as voters choose sides and retrospectively justify positions and/or misjudge the performance of their favored and disfavored political actors (e.g., Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Mason 2018).”

“Affective polarization, or negative partisanship, refers to sharpening feelings of animosity between people of different political persuasions (Abramowitz and Webster 2016; Mason 2018; Iyengar et al., 2019).”

“This contemporary polarization has been referred to as affective (Iyengar et al., 2012), sectarian (Finkel et al., 2020), or social polarization (Mason, 2018), meaning that it is driven by deeply rooted mechanisms of group affiliation in human psychology (Iyengar et al., 2019).”

“…theoretical arguments anticipate that toxicity offers a powerful way to differentiate ingroups from outgroups (Druckman et al. 2019; Gervais 2015; Mason 2018), we exposed participants to different scenarios where they see toxic speech directed at either people of different socioeconomic,…”

“One is a historically high level of between-party polarisation, now so pronounced that scholars can detect it in mass-level affect toward the opposing party (Mason 2018).”

“If the composition of discussion networks indeed shapes political out-group perceptions, then network homophily likely serves as a key mechanism driving trends in affective polarization (Mason 2018; Enders and Armaly 2019).”

“Social identities are becoming increasingly relevant in modern American politics as drivers of political attitudes and behaviors (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Huddy 2001; Mason 2018).”

“For example, Mason (2018) shows that US identity-based partisan polarization has increased because of the greater sorting of various identity groups into partisan groups and the corresponding decline of cross-cutting identities.”

“These sub-conditions were meant to provide further insight about how information on partisan identity might shape anonymous conversations about politics 8,22,46,48 .”

“This is consistent with the experience of the pandemic: the United States entered the summer months, most states dropped COVID emergency orders and reopened their economies, meaning that the salience of the pandemic declined for many Americans.”

“In contemporary America, it is one’s partisan group that is central to one’s political identity and shapes other attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors (Mason, 2018).”

“To be sure, political partisanship is a social identity that is likely to be durable, meaning that it would be surprising if we did find that it responded to a single article or statement (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Mason 2018).”

“Inasmuch as partisanship and ideology are increasingly aligned with other core social identities (Mason, 2018), the possibilities of reaching individuals with dissimilar views may be limited.”

“…as a major threat to US democracy (Draughton, 2022; Kingzette et al., 2021), but as politics become more intertwined with our social identities (Mason, 2018; McCoy & Somer, 2019), a process that is likely compounded through the personalization of the internet (Liu, 2012), polarization among…”

“Mason (2018) has elsewhere referred to this alignment as the formation of “ mega-identities, ” but the discussion here allows us to also see it as the formation of mega-perspectives.”

“Optimists hoped the election of Obama, the nation ’ s first African American president, would improve race relations in the United States.”

“Like-minded sources are perceived as more credible (Metzger et al., 2015), Wojcieszak 691 and political attitudes could be linked with social identity (Mason, 2018).”

“Political animosity has increasingly taken center-stage in US politics (Mason 2018).”

“Recent scholarship suggests that selfplacement on the ideological spectrum cannot be interpreted as a simple indicator of the respondent’s belief system, but is better conceived as a statement of affinity with a political identity (Devine 2015; Malka and Lelkes 2010; Mason 2018a, 2018b).”

“In the framework of social identity theory, Jews could be perceived as an out-group on both the left and right, and each extremist group would focus on negative aspects of this shared out-group in order to raise their group esteem (Tajfel et al. 1971; Mason 2018; Klar, Krupnikov and Ryan 2018).”

“Considering the intense emotional attachments that drive affective polarization (Iyengar et al., 2012; Mason, 2018), partisanship is a strong source of directional motivated reasoning (Druckman et al., 2013; Green et al., 2002; Sigel, 1964).”

“…working white people as irredeemably racist — captured by the racist ideologies that the Republican Party, in particular (though by no means exclusively) has relied upon to build electoral coalitions in the “ post-Civil Rights Era ” (Haney-Lopez 2014; Mason 2018; Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2019).”

“…divide in perceptions of antiwhite bias in the United States: hijacked victimhood claims are part of a Republican Party political strategy that maps onto its predominantly white and white Christian coalition identity (Mason 2018), reinforced by Barack Obama ’ s election since 2008 (Samuels 2022).”

“Americans are deeply polarized along partisan and ideological lines (Mason, 2018), and this effect extends to response to the COVID-19 crisis.”

“Scholars point to internet penetration and partisan media (Lelkes et al. 2015), ideological polarization among elites (Webster and Abramow-itz 2017), and the decline of ‘cross-cutting’ social identities (Mason 2015, 2018) as explanations for the rise in affective polarization in the United States.”

“Regardless, rather than treat these domains as conceptually separate we combine them here to further work being done investigating areas of overlap (cf. Mason 2018).”