Disability as a Political Identity

• In Event: How Far Have We Come? Disability and Voting

Abstract

To what extent does disability shape political identity? The CDC estimates that roughly 1 in 5 Americans lives with some kind of functional disability. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) depicts disabled Americans as a "discrete and insular minority" with a shared history of marginalization and mutual political interests. However, this claim has yet to be tested empirically. Using data from two original national surveys of American adults with disabilities, I derive a novel measure of subjective identification with disability ("Disability ID") and examine the individual-level characteristics motivating Disability ID. Finally, I explore the substantive interpretation of the Disability ID using a method of open-ended questioning pioneered by Feldman and Zaller (1992), and analyze responses to these questions using computational methods. In doing so, I provide novel evidence of how disability as a social category is conceptualized by disabled Americans, and the degree to which such interpretations vary among PWD with different levels of subjective attachment to the disability community.
Keywords: Disability, identity, measurement, text analysis

Author

• Joshua Thorp, University of Michigan