Media as a Sorting Force?: Relationships between Media & Partisan Social Sorting

• In Event: Communication-Based Drivers and Political Consequences of Affective Polarization

Abstract

The group nature of political life has become increasingly salient in the study of contemporary political communication (Jackson et al., 2020; Young, 2023) and in American politics more broadly (e.g., Achen & Bartels, 2017). One key theoretical framework that has emerged from this work is partisan social sorting, which describes the increasing psychological alignment of social and partisan identities within the American electorate (Mason, 2018). Mason and colleagues have argued that individuals who have strong attachments to multiple identities that are objectively aligned with their partisan group (e.g., a Conservative, white, Christian, Republican) will behave like extreme group members, displaying greater animosity toward the other side and participating vigorously to help their “team” win (Mason, 2016, 2018; Mason & Wronski, 2018). This contributes to broader problems such as affective polarization and political extremism (Mason, 2018; Phillips, 2022).

While media and technology have been heavily implicated in this on-going process of social sorting (see Mason, 2018), minimal empirical research has examined the reciprocal relationship between media and measures of social sorting (see Lane et al., 2023). Our study addresses this gap, by theorizing and testing the link between social sorting and a) media environments and b) media content.

We argue that new media technologies and high-choice media environments allow individuals to cultivate news diets and social networks that minimize exposure to “cross-cutting” identities, and further drive social sorting (Mason, 2016; Prior, 2007). We predict that individuals with information diets that are higher in news content and are less diverse in terms of news sources will report lower levels of social sorting.

In terms of media content, we look to partisan media as powerful sources of information about the alignment between social and political groups (Levendusky, 2013). Specifically, we explicate the concept of “identity linking” in which social and political identities are packaged together linguistically or visually in media content, thereby priming associations between aligned identities in the minds of the media consumers (Ahler & Sood, 2018). We predict that media diets with high levels of identity-linking cues (e.g., partisan media diets) will be positively related to social sorting.

To test our predictions, we rely on data from the 2020 American National Election Study (ANES) to measure social sorting and media use across a representative sample of Americans. Our measure of social sorting incorporates identification with ideological, racial/ethnic, religious, urban/rural, and partisan identities. We pair the ANES’s extensive outlet-level measures of media consumption, with scraped articles and transcripts from top news programs. This allows us to computationally analyze content from programs and outlets that respondents report using in the ANES, to quantify the presence of identity linking. Across our analyses we control for other known drivers of social sorting (demographic and psychological factors) to identify the unique variance in social sorting explained by media variables. This study provides a vital test of claims that media is a key driver of social sorting and better characterizes its role in the process of identity polarization in the American electorate.

REFERENCES

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Authors

• Melody Chen

• Daniel Lane, UC Santa Barbara

• Yifei Wang, UCSB