Cover of Uncivil Agreement
Uncivil Agreement How Politics Became Our Identity
by Lilliana Mason
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Cloth: 978-0-226-52440-5 | Paper: 978-0-226-52454-2 | Electronic: 978-0-226-52468-9
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226524689.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Political polarization in America is at an all-time high, and the conflict has moved beyond disagreements about matters of policy. For the first time in more than twenty years, research has shown that members of both parties hold strongly unfavorable views of their opponents. This is polarization rooted in social identity, and it is growing. The campaign and election of Donald Trump laid bare this fact of the American electorate, its successful rhetoric of “us versus them” tapping into a powerful current of anger and resentment.
           
With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently come to divide neatly between the two major political parties. She argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents. Even when Democrats and Republicans can agree on policy outcomes, they tend to view one other with distrust and to work for party victory over all else. Although the polarizing effects of social divisions have simplified our electoral choices and increased political engagement, they have not been a force that is, on balance, helpful for American democracy. Bringing together theory from political science and social psychology, Uncivil Agreement clearly describes this increasingly “social” type of polarization in American politics and will add much to our understanding of contemporary politics.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Lilliana Mason is assistant professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

REVIEWS

“Uncivil Agreement opens a window to a better understanding of the 'why' behind the polarization of contemporary American politics. This is a groundbreaking book, combining an interesting and important theoretical approach with strong empirical data, and it will have real impact.”­
— David P. Redlawsk, University of Delaware

“One of the most important books this year . . . . This is the kind of research that will change not just how you think about the world but how you think about yourself.”
— Ezra Klein, Vox

“A must-read for anyone trying to understand the increasingly polarized nature of American politics. Mason offers a psychological identity-based explanation for today’s polarized politics, an explanation that provides insights both into its most important attitudinal and behavioral consequences, but also into possible approaches that could help move the American public a few steps back from the precipice.”
— Richard R. Lau, Rutgers University

“The mutual disdain felt by Democrats and Republicans around the country has reached toxic levels, and it is having profound consequences for the quality of our policies, not just our politics. How did we get here? Mason’s brilliantly designed research and compelling writing reveal the most convincing explanation to date.”
— Nicholas Valentino, University of Michigan

“Sobering. . . . Mason argues that factors such as class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality used to cut across one another to a significant extent. . . . In the past decades, though, ‘partisan, ideological, religious, and racial identities have moved into strong alignment. . . . A single vote can now indicate a person’s partisan preference as well as his or her religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood and favorite grocery store.’”
— Yascha Mounk, New Yorker

“Highly recommended. . . . In describing American politics today, Mason argues that partisan identity (Democrat or Republican) has become a 'mega-identity' because it increasingly combines a number of different identities. . . . And which party people belong to is important because there is some evidence that instead of people choosing their party affiliation based on their political views (and changing parties if their views are no longer represented by that party), they shift their views to align with their party identity."
— Perry Bacon Jr., 538

“Recent debates about partisan polarization have focused primarily on ideology and policy views. In Uncivil Agreement, social identity moves to the center of how to think about the differences that divide the country.”
 
— New Books Network

"Mason describes social polarization in the USA and its political parties, a sorting that generated distinct psychological and behavioural outcomes. Americans have sorted into politically partisan (party support, based on ideology and policy positions) groups and social (racial, religious, geographic, ideological) groups. Because of social sorting, greater polarization of both parties has occurred. This polarization has generated greater partisan prejudice, more political action and more emotionality (reactivity). Her book explains how a well-sorted set of partisan and social identities, a phenomenon beginning in the 1950s and well underway before Obama was elected, is uniquely capable of motivating three polarizations—more partisan, more action and more emotion."
— Eleanor D. Glor, The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226524689.003.0000
[social identity;minimal group;ingroup bias;partisanship;responsible parties;polarization]
Humans are motivated not only to form groups but to form exclusive groups. The exclusivity of group identities isn’t necessarily based in animosity. As the psychologist Gordon Allport described in 1954, people automatically tend to spend time with people like themselves. Much of the reasoning for this is simple convenience. He explains, “it requires less effort to deal with people who have similar presuppositions” (Allport [1954] 1979, 17). However, once this separation occurs, we are psychologically inclined to evaluate our various groups with an unrealistic view of their relative merits. This is true of nearly any social group that can exist. These natural, even primal human tendencies toward group isolation and group comparison open the door to group conflict. The human inclination is to prefer and privilege members of the ingroup. Even this difference can cause discrimination, but it is not distinctly hostile. Under circumstances of perceived threat or competition, however, the preference for the ingroup can lead to outright hostility toward the outgroup, particularly when the competition is a zero-sum game. These dynamics underlie much of the current state of American polarization.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226524689.003.0001
[polarization;sorting;ideology;social;issue-based;identity-based]
Three terms central to the thesis of this book—polarization, sorting, and ideology—include within them both a social meaning and an issue-based meaning. The social definition focuses on people’s feelings of social attachment to a group of others, not their policy attitudes. The issue-based definition is limited to individual policy attitudes, excluding group attachments. In this chapter, I examine literature that supports this division.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226524689.003.0002
[Social sorting;history;polarization;cross-cutting]
Social cleavages today have become significantly linked to our two political parties, with each party taking consistent sides in racial, religious, ideological, and cultural divides.The makeup of the two parties has changed a great deal in the past sixty years, increasing the social distance between them. Partisans have less and less in common. Fewer cross-cutting cleavages remain to link the parties together and allow the understanding, communication, and compromise necessary to fuel the American electorate, and, by extension, the American government. Democrats and Republicans have grown so different from each other that cooperation is receding as a perceived value. When two teams grow so distinct and isolated from each other, the status of the teams themselves grows in importance. This chapter provides an overview of the history of this process.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226524689.003.0003
[partisan prejudice;social identity;partisan bias;affective polarization;ingroup bias;partyism]
Democrats and Republicans compete for the power to implement very different policy platforms, affecting the entire nation. Political victory provides power in government and increased freedom to enact real policy outcomes that often directly benefit the members of the winning party in the form of tax policies, welfare policies, business regulation or social programs. However, as Tajfel and Turner (1979) explain, “It is nearly impossible in most natural social situations to distinguish between discriminatory intergroup behavior based on real or perceived conflict of ‘objective’ interests between the groups and discrimination based on attempts to establish a positively valued distinctiveness for one’s own group” (46). In other words, though the parties are competing for real interests, they are also competing because it just feels good to win. Distinguishing between those motivations is not a simple matter, but it is important to remember that both motivations are separately present in any political competition. This chapter examines the evidence for the presence of discriminatory partisanship.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226524689.003.0004
[partyism;social sorting;cross-cutting]
As Democrats and Republicans grow socially sorted, they have to contend not only with the natural bias that comes from being a partisan but also with their own growing intolerance, sharpened by the shrinking of their social world. A conservative Democrat will feel closer to Republicans than a liberal Democrat would. A secular Republican will feel closer to Democrats than an evangelical Republican would. The sorting of our parties into socially distinct groups intensifies the partisan bias that we have always had.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226524689.003.0005
[anger;enthusiasm;emotions;partisan identity;threat;self-esteem;emotion]
The alignment of multiple social identities can directly affect the degree of emotion with which individuals respond to identity threats. As identities have moved into alignment in recent years, Americans have grown angrier at their political opponents, and also happier with their own team’s candidates.When multiple identities are strongly aligned, a threat to one identity affects the status of multiple other identities. The potential damage to a person’s self-esteem grows as more identities are partnered with the damaged group. While stronger identities motivate increased anger and enthusiasm in the face of group threat, more sorted identities have an even larger effect.The more sorted we become, the more emotionally we react to normal political events, and the more cross-cutting our identities, the more calmly we respond.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226524689.003.0006
[activism;social sorting;participation]
Social sorting increases levels of political activism. While most political scientists agree that political participation is a necessary ingredient of a functioning democracy, Berelson et al. (1954) pointed not to the value of participation itself but instead to the makeup of the electorate. If social sorting drives increased participation, the increasingly sorted electorate will be more homogeneously made up of “deeply concerned” citizens. Highly sorted citizens, as seen in prior chapters, care more for party victory and therefore will be more consistently partisan in their voting than the “erratic,” cross-cut voters. Cross-cutting identities provide some flexibility in voter preferences. Changing cross-cut voters into well-sorted voters is not necessarily a net good for a functioning democracy, particularly if the well-sorted are more likely to vote. The well-sorted voters are more likely to be active on behalf of their identities and emotions, which drive them consistently in the direction of voting that is less responsive to changing conditions and events.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226524689.003.0007
[polarization;sorting;solutions;fix;dealignment]
Parties should disagree about policy, and partisans should care which side wins. When the parties become socially isolated from one another, however, the conflict between them becomes less about governing and more about the conflict itself. This type of conflict is the one that needs to be addressed. There are a number of ways to approach this problem, so this chapter explores each strategy in turn, considering its usefulness for American polarization in particular. First, there is a broad literature that examines how to reduce intergroup conflict. This research was designed to reduce racial or religious group conflict, but in many cases it can be applied to partisan conflict as well. Second, some research in social psychology has begun looking at the effect of manipulating self-esteem and self-affirmation on political polarization, and this is another possible avenue for conflict reduction. Finally, there is a possibility for an un-sorting or dealignment of our partisan and social identities. This could occur through demographic trends or by the reappearance of a major rift in one party.

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2018. Page maintained by BiblioVault.