Browsing by Subject "social identity"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    A Case of Misunderstood Identity: The Role of Rural Identity in Contemporary American Mass Politics
    (2021-08) Lunz Trujillo, Kristin
    Why do rural individuals tend to be more right-wing in the contemporary U.S.? I answer this question by treating rurality as a social identity – a psychological attachment to rural or small-town life that encompasses a particular set of values and worldview. Previous studies on rural identity by scholars such as Katherine Cramer or Arlie Hochschild argue that rural areas’ turn to the right – particularly to right-wing populism - is rooted in socioeconomic class-based concerns and anti-urban resentment. However, using national experimental and survey data, in contrast to the qualitative and ethnographic approaches typically used, I find that rural identifiers are not more likely to be lower- or working-class individuals or to express economic concerns. Further, rural social identity does not significantly differ between racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. In other words, politically speaking the white working class does not equal rural identity, something often and nearly automatically assumed in scholarly and popular accounts. Instead, I argue that the turn to the right has been due to rural identifiers’ intermediate status in the societal status hierarchy. Rural areas perceive a group status-based threat from two different out-groups, which map onto definitions of right-wing populism. The first out-group is experts and intellectuals, who rural residents believe favor lower-status groups, such as immigrants – a second out-group - allowing them to cut in line ahead of rural Americans to gain social, economic and political status. These two out-groups (intellectuals/experts and immigrants) are more likely to be urban residents but not necessarily, complicating the idea of anti-urban resentment being the primary feature of rural identity. In this work, I rely on several sources of quantitative data, including original survey data and experiments collected over three years, as well as data from the ANES (American National Election Studies), the CCES (Cooperative Congressional Election Studies), and county-level data.
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    Common Ingroup Identity and Racial Minority Political Solidarity
    (2021-08) Bu, Wen
    Identification with a common ingroup has been shown to reduce prejudice against former outgroup members who are included in the common ingroup, but some research suggests that prejudice reduction interventions, including common ingroup identity, can have a “paradoxical” effect on minority group members of reducing their support for social change that would improve their group’s situation. These paradoxical effects stand in contrast to research on collective action and group consciousness suggesting that identification with a disadvantaged group predicts increases in collective action and political behavior on behalf of the group. In two 3-wave panel studies, using cross-lagged panel models (CLPM) and random-intercepts cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPM), I examined whether identification with a common ingroup that includes Whites (American identity) and identification with a common ingroup that does not include Whites (person of color, or POC, identity) have different effects on racial minorities’ attitudes toward other racial minority groups and policies that benefit racial minority groups. I generally found trait-level correlations that were consistent with the literature on common ingroup identity, paradoxical effects, collective action, and group consciousness: Among Asian (Study 1), Black (Study 2), and Latino (Study 2) Americans, common ingroup identities (American and POC) were positively associated with attitudes toward other racial groups included in the common ingroup, American identity was generally negatively associated with attitudes toward policies that benefit other minority groups, and disadvantaged group identities (racial and POC) were generally positively associated with attitudes toward policies that benefit minority groups. But except for POC identity and Asian Americans’ stereotype ratings of other minority groups and support for affirmative action (Study 1), I did not find consistent cross-lagged effects. Thus, these studies offer little support for the theory that identity predicts (and potentially causes) attitude change, at least among minority American adults.
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