Over 4 years, substantial numbers of Americans change how they identify along the lines of national origin, sexual orientation, religion, & class

Identity as Dependent Variable: How Americans Shift Their Identities to Better Align With Their Politics. Patrick J. Egan, Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, September 10, 2018, https://rubenson.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/egan-tpbw18.pdf

Political science generally treats demographic identities as “unmoved movers” in the chain of causality because these identities are conceptualized as being rooted in either ascriptive individual characteristics or hard-to-change aspects of individual experience. Here I hypothesize that the increasingly salient nature of partisanship and ideology as social identities leads liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans to shift their demo- graphic identities to better align with the prototypes of their political groups, and thus the identity groups that make up the left and right coalitions in U.S. politics. I explore the hypothesis with a panel dataset that tracks Americans’ identities and political affiliations over four years. The data show that substantial numbers of Americans change how they identify over this span along the lines of national origin, sexual orientation, religion, and class. Furthermore, identity switching with regard to Latino origin, religion, class, and sexual orientation is significantly predicted by Americans’ partisanship and ideology in their pasts. All of these shifts are in directions that bring Americans’ identities into better alignment with their politics. Politics plays a particularly important role in identification with two identity groups—lesbians, gays and bisexuals, and those identifying as having no religious affiliation—in that the impact of politics on identity is large for these groups relative to their prevalence in the population. In showing how the process of identification can be imbued with politics, these findings both enrich and complicate our efforts to un- derstand the relationship between identity and political behavior and indicate that caution must be taken in treating identities as firm, immovable political phenomena.