The role of group identity in fostering political polarization

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Presenter

Yan Chen

Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information

Authors: Kevin Bauer, Yan Chen, Florian Hett and Michael Kosfeld

Abstract

Identifying the foundations of political polarization is a pressing issue across the social sciences. Our study lends insight to this matter through a nationally representative online experiment exploring how (partisan) group identity shapes the process of political opinion formation. In the week prior to the 2020 US presidential election, we incentivized participants to predict how policy-sensitive statistics develop over the next year, conditional on which candidate becomes president. Participants can update their initial predictions after selecting or exogenously receiving factually similar articles on the respective topics curated from news sources with a right- or left-leaning slant. Our results show that those individuals whose behavior is responsive to group identities are both initially more politically polarized and exhibit a stronger partisan bias during the process of opinion formation: (i) their initial predictions about the development of policy-sensitive statistics more strongly depend on whether their candidate becomes president or not; (ii) the partisan gap between these predictions increases more strongly after reading two curated articles with a right- and left-leaning slant, respectively; and (iii) they exhibit a stronger taste for articles curated from politically congenial than politically opposing news sources. Further, in a treatment manipulation we find that reducing the salience of group identity by de-labeling the source of information decreases partisan bias in information demand, especially for participants sensitive to group identity. Overall, our results suggest that through its role in the process of opinion formation, the group identity roots of partisanship are a key factor contributing to political polarization.