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Abstract: Recent public and scholarly discourse suggests that partisanship informs how people feel about social groups by organizing those groups into camps of political friends and enemies. More generally, this possibility implies that Americans’ attitudes towards social groups exhibit interdependence, a heretofore underexplored proposition. We develop a conceptual and methodological approach to investigating such interdependence and apply it to attitudes towards 17 social groups, the broadest set of measures available to date. We identify three subpopulations with distinct attitude logics: partisans, who pit groups traditionally associated with the major political parties against one another; racialists, who contrast racial identification with other forms of group membership, using feelings about non-racial/ethnic groups to convey their tacit support for or criticism of racial identities; and neutrals, who generally refrain from evaluating social groups positively or negatively. Individuals’ social positions and experiences, particularly the strength of their partisanship and reported experience of racial discrimination, inform the ways they construe the social group landscape, though not in the same way for everyone. These findings shed light on contemporary political and social divisions while expanding the toolkit available for the study of attitudes towards social groups.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Hilary Term is convened by Dave Kirk and Jennifer Dowd.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.