Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity

“Examples outside of the COVID-19 pandemic might include fear of racism in Black Lives Matter protests in the United States or fear of the motivations of political opponents (Mason, 2018).”

“…USA democrats and republicans that grew through an increasingly narrow fusion between self and group identities is a prominent example of that (Mason, 2018), and the contemptuous struggle that currently divide Britons on the issue of remaining or leaving the EU is another one (Golec de Zavala…”

“The bulk of extant literature on affective polarization, however, is concentrated either on the specific cases of the United States (Iyengar et al. 2019) or Western Europe (e.g. Wagner 2021), which present particular features.”

“Its populist war with government is specifically directed at the federal level, but is based in an overall hostility to the very idea of collective action for the common good (Fried & Harris, 2021; Mason, 2018).”

“Maintaining group identity becomes a paramount motivation, which can be seen in the rise of affective polarization (Mason 2018).”

“Affective polarization also has social and psychological origins, tied to people’s tendency to favor in-groups over out-groups (Mason 2018; Robison and Moskowitz 2019).”

“When a court continually undermines the ideological goals of partisans, it is viewed as a threat to the group itself (Mason 2015; 2018).”

“…likely to increase the “sorting” of society into politically homogenous groups, creating fertile breeding ground for group polarization (Bishop, 2009; Mason, 2018a; Talisse, 2019), which occurs when like-minded members of a deliberating group move toward a more extreme viewpoint in whatever…”

“Without strong affective partisanship to bind voters to a particular party (see Mason 2018), voters may not feel compelled to support one side of a polarized system to prevent another from taking power.”

“Recent work has shown a rise in the importance of partisan identities, which have become more polarized in the United States along both ideological and affective dimensions (Achen & Bartles, 2016; Mason, 2018; Sunstein, 2015).”

“Moreover, in a key departure from existing research, we directly examine how an individual ’ s partisanship and race condition how historical information a ff ects belief formation, given the close association between race and party in contemporary American politics (Mason 2018).”

“Politics in the United States is dominated by partisanship (Kalmoe and Gross 2016; Mason 2015, 2018).”

“There are many dimensions to this division, including partisanship, race, and education (Mason, 2018).”

“…tastes are generally more filtered through the lens of their ideological worldviews, are narrower, and may display some of the political (Iyengar et al. 2019; Mason 2018) and racial (Már 2020) affective polarization understood by political scientists as more common among conservatives.”

“When, in such cases, the degree of affect and hence polarization reaches critical levels, the consequence is an increase in the volume of political activism and in the likelihood that such activism is potentially dangerous (Mason 2018).”

“Party identification is one of the most important influences on U.S. citizens’ views about climate change (Merkley & Stecuła, 2018), as well as being one of the most important and divisive factors in how Americans see each other more generally (Mason, 2018).”

“…the case that as Democrats and Republicans polarized and became more driven by ideological differences (Abramowitz 2018) and affective dissension (Mason 2018), a framework built around the claim that parties are coalitions of various groups of policy demanders has gained theoretical and…”

“…research suggests that the mass public has gone from consensus on preferences regarding the core values underpinning American political culture (e.g., Hartz 1955; McClosky and Zaller 1984) to dissensus, with major cleavages between partisan and ideological groups (Jacoby 2014; Mason 2015, 2018).”

“According to Mason (2018), the Democratic and Republican parties have become increasingly “sorted” socially, meaning that party, race, religion, and even TV viewing habits are all increasingly correlated.”

“…of the research emerging from political science from the past decade illustrates how policy issues can become politicized (Achen and Bartels 2017; Mason, 2018; Mutz, 2018) and racialized (Tesler & Sears, 2010; Parker & Barreto, 2014; Jardina, 2019) to the point where the primary lens through…”

“In this era of hyper-partisanship, scholars argue, Americans hold fast to their partisan identities and look upon members of the opposing party with not just skepticism but outright contempt (Iyengar and Westwood 2015; Mason 2018; c.f. Orr and Huber 2020).”

“The European context surrounding GMOs may be different than the United States as well, as the issue receives more attention and there is more vocal opposition in some quarters.”

“Alternatively, given the substantial effect of partisanship on political attitudes (Achen and Bartels, 2017; Mason, 2018), alongside the nationalization and homogenization of political behavior (Hopkins, 2018), we might expect average issue stances of partisans to be the same across the urban –…”

“The reach of partisanship in the United States, however, extends beyond the political realm and has become a central component of some partisans’ social identities (see, for example, Mason 2018).”

“These identitybased ideological appeals, focused on symbolism, in-group loyalty, and out-group threat (Mason 2018a), are the key for maintaining a viable electoral coalition that can support a conservative government in power.”

“As a result, individuals may strongly oppose the other party, even if their policy preferences are functionally similar (Mason, 2018b, p. 21).”

“The past several decades have seen a rise in affective polarisation, with partisans feeling more warmly towards their co-partisans and more antagonistic towards outpartisans (Mason, 2018).”

“…focused on polls, a separate literature has also developed in recent years concerning the influence of group norms and social identity on shaping individual attitudes (e.g., Mason, 2018; Suhay, 2015), which suggests an important causal explanation for why poll results might affect policy views.”

“We tend to take extreme versions of shared views to impress our normative allies (Achen and Bartels, 2016; Kinder and Kalmoe, 2017; Mason, 2018).”

“During this period of social (Mason 2018) and affective (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012) polarization, it is generally understood to be the case that partisans will always vote for their own party’s candidate.”

“This structure has led some to hypothesize that there are two types of political polarisation: affective polarisation and issue-based polarisation (Iyengar et al., 2012; Mason, 2018a).”

“As superordinate categories (Gaertner et al., 1993), political parties encapsulate smaller, heterogeneous groups (Mason, 2018).”

“This means that polarization is not primarily rooted on ideology but on identity (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012; Mason 2018).”

“Affective polarization is also associ‐ ated with resistance to compromise, intolerance, and advancement of their own group over the collective good (Mason, 2018).”

“As a result, “Democrats and Republicans have a lot more information about who their social and partisan enemies are” (Mason 2018:26; emphasis added).”

“Instead of confirming their own beliefs vis-à-vis co-partisan sources (Mason 2018; Vandeweerdt 2021), unelected elites presume the general public agrees with them on critical issues.”

“This finding suggests that polarization might be built around political choices (Barber & Pope, 2019) rather than around policy issues (Mason, 2018).”

“While this should theoretically be related to one’s ideology, in the American context, the consistency of citizens’ ideological views has long been called into question (Iyengar et al., 2012; Mason, 2018).”

“…attention (Bendix and Mackay, 2017; Gervais and Morris, 2018; Blum, 2020), despite having long been thought of as the more cohesive of the two major parties, characterized by a common conservative worldview and more deeply entrenched partisan identity (Grossmann and Hopkins, 2016; Mason, 2018).”

“More recently though, scholars have explored the social divide between partisans (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012; Iyengar and Westwood 2015; Mason 2015; 2018).”

“This negative affect arises from the fact that partisans in the US increasingly treat identification with a political party as one of their core social identities (Mason 2018), as do citizens in other divided democracies (Westwood et al.”

“Today, America is deeply divided along partisan and cultural lines (Mason 2018).”

“As partisanship has increased and issues are now more strongly focused through party agendas (Mason, 2018), county-level sociopolitical autonomy has likely been eroded, similar to what occurred between the state and federal levels in that policy decisions may be more a referendum of political and…”

“Scholars have documented worrying rises in levels of antipathy, distrust, and hatred across party lines, or “affective polarization,” even as, curiously, the average American partisan has not become significantly more extreme in their views (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012; Mason 2018b).”

“According to Mason (2018), political polarization is particularly acute in the United States today because partisan political affiliations are now closely tied with peoples’ racial and religious identities.”

“Further, liberal and conservative political coalitions have become increasingly sorted by racialized attitudes (Mason 2018; Tesler 2016).”

“Intergroup tensions are a persistent feature of American politics (most recently: Mason, 2018) and motivational biases seem to be evenly distributed across ideological groups (Ditto et al., 2018; see also Collins, Crawford, and Brandt, 2017 for evidence of ideological symmetries).”

“A broad literature on affective polarization has shown that intense ideologues are also unconditionally more motivated to participate in politics and in social media (Barberá 2020; Guess 2021; Huddy et al. 2015; Mason 2018).”

“Additionally, as politics have become increasingly polarized (Mason 2018), Trump’s (and other Republicans’) distaste for COVID-19 mitigation measures could be explained by their desire to simply do what the Democrats did not support.”

“Democrats and Republicans have become more racially and ideo-logically homogenous than before (Levendusky 2009; Mason 2018).”

“But here we are, 70 years later, and now so many scholars write about the negative consequences of a responsible, read polarized, two-party system (e.g., Mason, 2018).”

“Social sorting , on the other hand, is defined as a convergence of social identities and partisan identities, such as race, sexual orientation, religion, occupations, social movements, and so on (Mason, 2016, 2018a; Mason & Wronski, 2018; Weber & Klar, 2019).”

“Republican representatives in Congress have become entrenched in their partisan positions (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006; Theriault 2008) as their voters have embraced partisanship as a social identity (Mason 2018).”

“If 2 sides are not speaking the same moral language, identity threats can be triggered, and it may become all but impossible to find common ground on contentious issues (Mason 2018).”

“The reason for this is that overall they have stronger partisan identity and their other social identities are more likely to reinforce their partisan one (Mason, 2018).”

“…party gains unified control over the levers of national power, well-attuned and informed out-party voters and affiliated groups are likely to be angry, fearful and highly mobilized in response to the threat of federal action from the opposing party (for example, see Mason 2013; Mason 2018).”