Identity as Dependent Variable: How Americans Shift Their Identities to Align with Their Politics. Patrick J. Egan. American Journal of Political Science, December 20 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12496
Abstract: Political science generally treats identities such as ethnicity, religion, and sexuality as “unmoved movers” in the chain of causality. I hypothesize that the growing salience of partisanship and ideology as social identities in the United States, combined with the increasing demographic distinctiveness of the nation's two political coalitions, is leading some Americans to engage in a self‐categorization and depersonalization process in which they shift their identities toward the demographic prototypes of their political groups. Analyses of a representative panel data set that tracks identities and political affiliations over a 4‐year span confirm that small but significant shares of Americans engage in identity switching regarding ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and class that is predicted by partisanship and ideology in their pasts, bringing their identities into alignment with their politics. These findings enrich and complicate our understanding of the relationship between identity and politics and suggest caution in treating identities as unchanging phenomena.
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From the September 10, 2018 version:
Conclusion
These findings yield new insight on the nature of politically salient American identities
and how they can be shaped by the liberal-conservative, Democrat-Republican divide.
Inter-temporal stability varies highly among identities, running from relatively high (for
race, Latino origin and most religions) to moderate (for party identification and some national origins) to low (for most national origins, sexual orientation, and class). Many of the
identities commonly understood to be highly stable can in fact shift over time, and those
who have switched in or will soon switch out of identities make up very large shares of
those identifying as sexual minorities, religious “nones,” and any economic class.
These analyses permit us to see for the first time the extent to which over-time instability in identification is associated with politics, with liberalism and Democratic party
identification predicting shifts toward identification as Latino, lesbian, gay, or bisexual, as
nonreligious, lower class, and claiming national origin associated with being non-white;
and conservatism and Republican party ID yielding movement toward identification as being a member of Protestant faith, and having had an experience as a born-again Christian.
This is no small discovery: many of these identities are at the center of important American
policy debates, and those who claim these identities are key blocs of voters, party activists
and political donors. The data show us how in our era, which is so polarized that political
affiliations become identities in themselves, politics can create and reinforce identities even
thought to be as fixed as racial and ethnic categories. They thus reveal that “social sorting,”
while predominantly the result of individuals changing their politics to align with
their identities, is also due in some part to people shifting their identities to better align
with their politics.
Nearly sixty years ago, the “Michigan school” authors of The American Voter noted that the influence of group membership on political behavior might be overstated, as members of many identity groups often “come to identify with the group on the basis of preexisting beliefs and sympathies.” (Campbell et al 1960, 323). The findings presented here join mounting evidence that this concern was well-placed, and that more rich discoveries await those who continue to make use of powerful tools and data to understand the origins of important identities in American politics.
By examining the impact of economic conditions on a broad range of social ills for 40 rich countries for the period 2000–2015, this study represents the most up-to-date and comprehensive examination of the famous inequality hypothesis. To our knowledge, this is also the first aggregate-level study in which a larger number of potential mediators between economic conditions and social ills has been put to an empirical test. Descriptively, while the ranking of countries according to their number of social ills largely matches that presented in The Spirit Level, our finding that social ills have decreased over time in all but two countries is a genuinely new finding that contradicts the widely accepted diagnose of social malaise in the developed world (Eckersley 2012; Elchardus and De Keere 2013). While some of our results provide partial support for the inequality hypothesis, others contradict it. We begin our discussion with the supporting evidence, which stems exclusively from the cross-sectional analysis.
The first confirmatory finding is that cross-sectionally the scale of income inequality is positively associated—year by year—with social ills, an association that holds when economic prosperity is considered at the same time (confirming H1). This association is found in our two sets of rich countries, the global (full) sample, which is culturally more diverse, and the subset of European countries (confirming H3). There thus seems to be no need to confine the inequality hypothesis to the Western world. In light of the criticism that Wilkinson and Pickett especially received for disregarding cultural peculiarities (Saunders and Evans 2010; Snowdon 2010), this is a most relevant finding.
A second and at least partly theory-confirming finding concerns potential mediators. Our cross-sectional results lend some support, first of all, to the idea that status anxiety mediates between economic conditions and social ills. Two qualifications, however, are essential. While average levels of status anxiety are systematically higher in less affluent countries, they are not higher in more unequal ones, as The Spirit Level presumes. Secondly, our cross-sectional finding that the characteristics of social cohesion perform better as mediators suggests that it is the erosion of social life more generally which evokes health and social problems, not status anxiety specifically. Interestingly, this conclusion resonates well with the thrust of Wilkinson’s (1996, 1999) older works.
As regards the findings that challenge the inequality hypothesis and the spirit level theory, most importantly, changing income inequality does not cause changes in the number of social ills (disconfirming H4). Our study thus joins those that find a link between inequality and social ills cross-sectionally, but not longitudinally (e.g. Beckfield 2004; Leigh and Jencks 2007; Avendano 2012; Hu et al. 2015). Our results further indicate that economic prosperity is related to lower social ills—cross-sectionally in both subsets of rich nations, and longitudinally in Europe, in both cases while simultaneously considering the income distribution. This questions the exclusive focus on inequality that many scholars advocate. The positive impact of prosperity on societies is already observable at the beginning of the 2000s according to our data; and so it was not a new phenomenon that appeared after The Spirit Level was published. Seen in conjunction with the mounting evidence that individual quality of life is also better in richer countries (e.g., Hagerty and Veenhoven 2003; Deaton 2008; Delhey and Steckermeier 2016), it appears premature to declare economic resources ineffective for making lives and societies better, and even more so, as in the study at hand increases in economic prosperity over time decrease social ills, at least in Europe. In our data, the causal effect on social ills is actually exerted by economic prosperity, not by changes in the income distribution. Still, we do not want to gloss over the finding that in the European sub-sample the cross-sectional association between economic prosperity and social ills became weaker in later years of the period studied. This might mean that some rich societies are experiencing diminishing returns from economic resources, but still have positive returns—in particular in Europe—so “wealthier is healthier” (Biggs et al. 2010) is still a valid slogan for contemporary rich societies.
The mediation analysis could only be performed for Europe. Here, a genuinely new finding is that the same mechanisms that mediate in cross-sectional analysis between inequality and social ills also mediate between economic prosperity and social ills, namely satisfaction with social life and experienced social exclusion (largely in support of the cross-sectional part of H6); and further, that the mechanism prominently proposed by the spirit level theory—feelings of inferiority—only mediates the attenuating effect of economic prosperity. This suggests that prosperity exerts its positive effect on social ills by improving the social climate within societies (cf. Welzel 2013; Delhey and Dragolov 2016). Nevertheless, the longitudinal mediation analysis could not ultimately clarify the experienced quality-of-life mechanism through which economic prosperity has an effect on social ills. Future research, ideally based on larger case numbers, might yield more conclusive results on this issue.
Our results for economic prosperity raise the important question of why we unearthed a robust prosperity-social ills nexus when Wilkinson and Pickett did not. Re-running our analysis for the set of 21 countries from The Spirit Level, we find two explanations: country selection and methods. Indeed, there is no significant correlation between economic prosperity and our ISI index for the 21 countries in any of the years 2000–2015. In other words, it is Wilkinson and Pickett’s—disputable—compilation of countries which produces a non-correlation. Furthermore, when estimating pooled OLS regressions of ISI on inequality and prosperity for their 21 countries over the full period of 16 years, there is a robust social ills attenuating effect of prosperity, entirely in line with our results, but contrary to Wilkinson and Pickett. This demonstrates how unadvisable it is to draw conclusions based on zero-order correlations alone.
A limitation of our study is that the mediation analysis could only be performed for Europe. European societies are in the vanguard of value change toward self-expression values (Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Welzel 2013). Provided this peculiarity rubs off on the social production functions of these societies, we cannot rule out that the focus on Europe in the mediation analysis overemphasizes the role of social mediators and underemphasizes the role of material ones, such as economic strain. Moreover, a multi-level framework could be applied to the best-performing mechanisms from our analysis to determine whether they imply contextual effects of inequality and prosperity, or rather composition effects (for status anxiety, see, for example, Whelan and Layte 2014). Further research is also needed to explore potential cultural conditions that breed or prevent social ills. Although we have established that the impact of income inequality is not weaker in the culturally diverse global sample, it is still conceivable that cultural forces play their part in the generation of health and social problems.
In conclusion, while from a cross-sectional perspective the inequality hypothesis seems accurate but one-sided, in a longitudinal perspective it appears to be wrong. This news might be hard to digest for those who assume that creating a ‘better’ society is, definitely and primarily, a matter of income redistribution. For policymakers, our study instead suggests that economic prosperity should be prioritized over income redistribution as an instrument to achieving a less problem-ridden society. Naturally, tackling inequalities might still be of paramount importance for achieving other valuable goals, such as to enhance social justice.
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