Journal Entries #5

Social Sorting: A Deeper Dive

This is excerpted from the introduction to the edited anthology: Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization?  (Cambridge Press, 2022). The introduction provides a helpful introduction to the broad themes of threats to democracy and democratic resilience without the deep dive into the weeds of the individual chapters. I will provide definitions and introductory remarks as needed to help understandings for those new to political science. The introduction is titled  How Democracies Endure: The Challenges of Polarization and Sources of Resilience. It is by Robert C. Lieberman (Johns Hopkins University), Suzanne Mettler (Cornell University) and Kenneth M. Roberts (Cornell University). This section is fairly straightforward and the authors carefully define their terms. If you have any questions or have any trouble understanding a part of it please reach out. I am here to help.

Introductory Remarks: 

This section takes a deeper dive into social identity politics, polarization and support for anti-democratic approaches and the rise of white identity politics. Identity isn't just about policy, but also about core values that make up a sense of self, making compromise more difficult. People see the issues, and their parties, as "protecting their way of life" from those that would destroy it.  "These developments, in turn, may put the polity at risk by leading to greater emotional hostility, moral disengagement, the possibility of violence, and the rejection of election results that threaten one’s own party." The section also explores how gun ownership has become linked to larger value sets, identity and a way of life. 

Social Polarization and Partisanship

As polarization has grown, many ordinary Americans themselves have been drawn into it. Four chapters explore how social polarization and partisan affiliation have come to be mutually reinforcing and what this trend means for democratic resilience. Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe introduce the concept of “social sorting,” showing how social identities have increasingly aligned with political identities. The mid-twentieth-century political parties that featured overlapping social identities have become transformed into a Republican Party made up primarily of white Americans, including those who strongly identify as evangelical Christians and those who are particularly concerned with maintaining their privileged status, while the Democratic Party has grown increasingly diverse in its composition and simultaneously more affirming of inclusive policies. Drawing on psychological theories, Mason and Kalmoe illuminate how such social sorting can lead to intergroup conflict and political intolerance. These developments, in turn, may put the polity at risk by leading to greater emotional hostility, moral disengagement, the possibility of violence, and the rejection of election results that threaten one’s own party. Mason and Kalmoe draw on the historical record to demonstrate that such outcomes are not only well within the American experience but in fact have been commonplace, making their reemergence today highly conceivable. Social sorting can facilitate what Matthew Lacombe calls “identity-based mobilization,” the political rallying together of those who share a common identity. While such mobilization is fueled by democratic processes, it can have deleterious consequences for democracy if it fosters the kinds of intolerant and exclusionary political reactions that Mason and Kalmoe discuss. The next three chapters explore how this has occurred in recent decades around race, religion, and gun ownership. Although many journalists widely attributed support for Trump in the 2016 election to economic anxiety, Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto show that support for him was fueled more heavily by white identity. They examine the role of fears on the part of some whites that they were losing “their country” or “way of life,” as they perceived growing racial and ethnic diversity in the US population – and the election of the nation’s first black president – as a threat to their status.50 The capacity of such fears to fuel conservative, and in some instances, authoritarian political movements has a long history in the United States, encompassing the Ku Klux Klan, John Birch Society, and the Tea Party. These movements risk harm to democracy because they stoke intolerance of social difference that can activate and mobilize latent authoritarian currents that are intrinsically threatening to democratic resilience.51 Religious sorting plays a crucial role in contemporary politics, as Michele Margolis explains. Today’s religious divisions, different from those of the past, cut across denominations, joining together active evangelical evangelical Protestants and Catholics in the Republican Party, and a religiously pluralistic coalition among Democrats, with its quickly growing contingent of less religious or unaffiliated Americans joining highly religious African Americans. This partisan cleavage, which has been growing for forty years, has become extremely consequential for American politics as highly mobilized religious conservatives have become a core constituency of the Republican Party. Margolis argues that such mobilization threatens democracy by weakening political accountability, stymying political discourse and dissenting views, and undermining the possibility for compromise and negotiation. The identity of gun ownership has been actively cultivated in recent decades by the National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the largest mass-based interest groups in the United States. Matthew Lacombe explains that the NRA portrays candidates and legislative proposals as a fundamental threat to gun owners’ interests and values, generating fear and mobilizing them politically. The tactics it uses make compromise harder to attain, encourage supporters to delegitimize opponents and think of them as enemies, and spur political leaders to engage in constitutional “hardball.” These developments therefore harm democratic accountability and responsiveness. By these accounts, social sorting can be used by political leaders to generate voter turnout and political participation and to promote a policy agenda. While such mobilization itself fosters democratic values, including civic engagement and representation, the goals and tactics it features can undermine democratic norms and capacity, particularly when it is in the service of a narrow social base or ideological stance. Related to this point, several chapters point to a fundamental asymmetry between today’s Republican and Democratic parties. The Republican Party is more socially homogenous, predominantly white and Christian, and as a result its supporters are more likely to feel that their identity itself is at stake in elections and the policy process. It has also become more ideologically grounded and homogenous over time, with a well-defined set of issue positions defining conservative orthodoxy. The Democratic Party, by contrast, encompasses greater diversity on multiple dimensions, including race, ethnicity, religion and religiosity. As a coalition of different and often crosscutting interests, it encompasses a broad ideological spectrum ranging from moderate-liberals to left-progressives.52 This structural asymmetry between the parties fosters a different kind of politics in each; Republicans, who are able to mobilize around targeted policy arenas that offer their constituencies more concentrated costs and benefits, are more likely than Democrats to eschew compromise and negotiation and to treat politics as mortal combat. Democrats, on the other hand, tend to develop a list of policy stands that appeal to specific constituencies but often struggle to connect those policy stances to overarching identities or principles.53 Finally, as Pierson and Schickler point out, the meso-institutional processes that fuel contemporary polarization are more intense on the right and provide continuing incentives for Republicans, more than Democrats, to pursue polarizing political strategies.