Creating State Communities: State Identity, Polarization, and Social Reciprocity

• In Event: Politics and Policy in American Federalism

Abstract

American political behavior is nationalizing; the combination of the nationalization of party brands, decline in state and local news, and nationally-oriented identities has produced nationalized vote choice and engagement (Hopkins 2018). Simultaneously, Americans have become better sorted into political parties based on their social identities (Mason 2018) and, if not more polarized on major political issues, certainly more affectively polarized (Iyengar and Westwood 2015, Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes 2012). While Democrats and Republicans perceive each other as very dissimilar (Druckman et al 2022, Westfall et al 2015), Levendusky (2023) demonstrates that reminding them of our common identities can reduce polarization.
While Levendusky focuses on the power of national identity and shared support for sports teams, we argue for the importance of a different identity—one’s attachment to their state of residence—to potentially reduce polarization. Many of America’s basic federalist institutions are predicated on the idea that citizens hold dual state and national identities (Feeley and Rubin 2008; Levy 2007) and that states have unique political cultures and policy needs (Riker 1964; Elazar 1984). Anecdotally, state pride manifests everywhere in our daily lives, from Texas-shaped tortilla chips to Wisconsin cheese-themed headwear to pillows, pins and wall art printed with an aesthetically pleasing outline of the state. And yet, even as contemporary political science points to the importance of place-based identities in shaping politics and political behavior (e.g. Cramer 2016; Enos 2017), individuals’ identification with their state appears to be waning or taking on a less political hue (Wong 2010; Hopkins 2018).
In previous work, we find that even though individuals do not identify with their state as strongly as they do America as a whole, this identity nonetheless has an impact on their political attitudes, especially trust in their state and local governments (Pears and Sydnor 2022a, Pears and Sydnor 2022b). In this project, we build on this argument to address how Americans’ attachment to their state has the potential both to exacerbate existing polarization and to soften its effects. On one hand, if state identity is just one more dimension on which social sorting is occurring (Mason 2018), making it more salient could serve to reinforce existing partisan divisions. On the other hand, state identity could mitigate polarization by serving as a cross-cutting identity that unites people from both sides of the aisle. As mentioned above, Levendusky (2023) finds that shared identities—pride in being an American, or a common investment in an NFL team—can reduce feelings of partisan polarization. Given that state identity tends to be grounded in apolitical content—natural beauty or cultural diversity, for example—increasing its salience in people’s minds might make them more open to the political perspectives of people who share their love of the views from Virginia’s Skyline Drive or the variety of ethnic restaurants in Houston. Not only that, increasing the salience of state identity could break the hold that national politics have on our attention and provide an alternative framework for how we might navigate political life.
To investigate these opposing possibilities, we focus on the allocation of resources across partisan and state-based identities: are those with higher state identity more likely to donate money to causes or support policies that benefit their state at the expense of other states or the nation, and how does partisanship moderate this relationship? In a set of three survey experiments, we randomly assign to a condition where state identity is made salient or one where it is not. Then, each experiment will contain a basic dictator’s game (see Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler 1986) in which players allocate money 1) between themselves and a second participant, 2) between three non-profit organizations or political campaigns—one in their home state, one in another state, and one more focused on the nation as a whole—or 3) between in-state but out-party and out-of-state but in-party organizations. Each dictator’s game explores how state identity influences Americans’ willingness to fairly distribute resources between residents of their own state and those from other states. The findings from the third experiment in particular will speak to the theoretical question of state identity’s role in alleviating polarization. If priming state identity leads people to support a group that does not share their partisan views, we will have evidence that Levendusky’s (2023) common bond hypothesis can also play out through people’s state attachments.

Authors

• Emily Sydnor, Syracuse University

• Emily Pears, Claremont McKenna College