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It is easy enough to rattle off numerous categories of social identities long of interest to political behavior scholars—race, sex, state or nation, party, ideology, social class, etc. But, a precise definition and measurement strategy for examining these identities is more elusive. This article discusses the conceptual foundations of a recently developed approach to measuring identity and focuses on its specific application as a new measure of partisanship in the United States.

Despite the long-standing and prominent place of partisan identification (PID) in many aggregate- and individual-level models of voting behavior and political cognition in the United States, several basic features of this attachment remain poorly understood and significant controversies persist. The research presented here seeks to build upon the recent conceptualization of PID as a social identity (Green, Palmquist & Schickler, 2002; Greene, 1999, 2000, 2004; Huddy, Mason & Aaroe, 2010) in order to increase our knowledge of the ways in which it may function as such and to expand our understanding of partisan intensity and PID's biasing effects. This conceptualization is one that has been put to surprisingly limited use in political science. This work draws upon new data I have generated during my time as a doctoral student, making use of survey experimental paradigms and a new implicit measure. I call upon foundational and cutting-edge concepts and methods from social psychology in addressing several active research programs in political behavior. The first essay presents the most direct evidence to date regarding the presence of an affective identity component of PID (the way in which Campbell, Converse, Miller & Stokes (1960) conceived of the attachment), which sheds light on partisan intensity and measurement of it. Using data from a survey fielded among subjects in the Project Implicit research pool, it introduces a novel measure of implicit PID that directly measures the identity component as it is defined in balanced identity theory (Greenwald, Banaji, Rudman, Farnham, Nosek & Mellott, 2002), and compares it to standard PID measures. Among other things, the findings offer some confirmation that the traditional two-item, seven-point PID measure largely captures respondent identity levels. This is arguably the strongest evidence to date that the measure does, for the most part, what it was designed to do. I also find that Republican partisans, in the current political environment, are significantly stronger partisan identifiers than their Democratic counterparts. The second essay brings new data from embedded survey experiments to bear, assessing, in the case of political party, the presence of the kind of group-based bias often associated with social identities. The manipulation and measure are designed to avoid the confounders present in prior studies that have allowed some to question the biasing effect of PID. Consistent evidence suggestive of group-based bias emerges. These findings establish a new benchmark in this research program by demonstrating, at a micro level, the extent to which partisans are susceptible to a set of standard mechanisms for rationalization, information dismissal and motivated processing. Beyond adding evidence to the debate regarding perceptual bias, though, this paradigm allows for more nuanced analysis of the nature of that bias and heterogeneity in its expression. The final essay uses the notion of "rooting interest" to link this perceptual bias with a social identity model of PID. A manipulation was used to vary the relative salience of an individual's personal and collective self-concepts (Ambady, Paik, Steele, Owen-Smith & Mitchell, 2004), the interplay between which is at the heart of psychological conceptualizations of identity. The effects of this manipulation on the level of bias observed suggest that the strength of rooting interest may vary somewhat, but that the nature of the variation depends upon the political saturation of the context and differs between Republicans and Democrats in the current political environment. The results 1) demonstrate that manipulation of self-concept salience and variations in background politicization can alter the magnitude of bias; 2) provide evidence that this bias is pronounced even in less politicized contexts and when the personal self-concept is made more salient; and 3) suggest that bias is asymmetric across the two parties, with Republicans showing a higher baseline level, but some propensity to have their bias level manipulated downward, and Democrats starting at a lower point, but with the potential to be manipulated upward. Taken together, these new data (from both the experimental and measurement work) demonstrate two important points that were not as apparent in prior studies using other methods. To begin with, it appears that partisans of various intensities (strong Democrat versus strong Republican, for instance) should not be thought of or analyzed as mirror images of each other. Furthermore, it appears that a meaningful "Identity Gap" may exist between Republicans and Democrats in the current political moment. These emergent findings suggest future areas of inquiry, ways in which we might reexamine prior findings, and new potential research programs.

AbstractWe use a novel survey experiment with a broadly representative sample to reveal an important phenomenon in voter integration of campaign communications: preference-mediated partisan motivation. When evaluating the credibility of candidate position changes on minimum wage policy (a readily quantifiable and salient issue domain), partisans do not take a new stance at face value, apply universal skepticism, or simply afford more credibility to co-partisans. Instead, they process a candidate's stance through an interaction between the voter's partisan allegiance and their own policy preference. Partisans update more when a co-partisan moves closer to them than when the candidate shifts away from them. The opposite pattern emerges with the other party's candidates: partisans tend to be more receptive if the candidate moves away from them. This feature of campaign message acceptance has profound implications for political communication and our understanding of partisan cognition.

AbstractMany Americans associate themselves with their political party in a deep, visceral way. Voter identification with a political party has powerful implications for not just how voters behave, but how there are exposed to and receive information about the world. We describe how this tying of one's self-concept to a party, which can be analogous to die-hard sports fandom, plays a central role in political cognition. It leads voters identifying with the two parties to perceive the political (and even seemingly apolitical) world in dramatically different ways. We detail the psychological mechanisms by which this party identity produces these distortions and offer examples of the bias that emerges. We conclude by discussing the implications of these phenomena for perpetuating our current hyper-polarized political discourse.

Published and informal assessments of the prospects for neuroimaging in political science have tended to range from overexuberant to reflexively dismissive. We seek to present a cautious but fair middle ground in considering this new methodology, primarily from an epistemological perspective. Our examination centers on the relationship between two levels of analysis, focusing on the potential for connection between behavior‐based theories of political psychology and cognition and the neural processes and systems involved in generating behaviors and states of mind. We explore the place of each level of analysis on its own, as well as the potential for the fruitful interaction of the two. This analysis brings together opinions and ideas presented by others in various forums and across multiple disciplines, offers a discussion of the the promises and perils of neuroimaging in its application to social science, as well as some practical thoughts regarding its early‐stage incorporation into political psychology. We argue in favor of proceeding with more substantial incorporation of neuroimaging into political psychology's methodological arsenal, but note that this will initially require both (1) greater acceptance of work more focused on presenting empirical results than on providing dispositive evidence in broader theoretical debates and (2) a commitment on the part of those conducting this research to refrain from overstating the definitiveness of its theoretical implications.