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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Soc. Psychol.
Sec. Attitudes, Social Justice and Political Psychology
Volume 2 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frsps.2024.1338515
This article is part of the Research Topic The Political Psychology of Social Change View all 7 articles

Can Democrats and Republicans Like Each Other? Depends on How You Define "American"

Provisionally accepted
Selin Toprakkiran Selin Toprakkiran 1*Jonathan Gordils Jonathan Gordils 2Jeremy P. Jamieson Jeremy P. Jamieson 3
  • 1 Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, United States
  • 2 University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut, United States
  • 3 University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Democrats and Republicans increasingly demonstrate negative intergroup attitudes, posing a threat to bipartisan progress. Based on the Common Ingroup Identity Model, people from different political groups can simultaneously identify with a superordinate group, such as a national identity. This has the potential to ameliorate negative intergroup attitudes, though high levels of national identity are also associated with authoritarianism and intolerance. How can a common national identity improve relations between Democrats and Republicans? In this observational study (N =1,272), Democrats and Republicans differed in how they defined what it means to be American, and higher American identity was related to more positive attitudes toward members of the other party. Most importantly, this relationship was moderated by participants' definition of what it means to be "American", regardless of party or political orientation. Those who defined what it means to be American in more restrictive terms (i.e., U.S.-born, English-speaking, and Christian) reported less positive attitudes toward members of the other political party as their identification as an American became stronger. Taken together, our results suggest that strengthening national identity might be key to improving attitudes between Democrats and Republicans, as long as this identity is inclusive.

    Keywords: common identity, Political parties, attitudes, intergroup relations, partisanship Words (excluding titles, Headers, Footnotes, including the abstract): 5

    Received: 14 Nov 2023; Accepted: 24 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Toprakkiran, Gordils and Jamieson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Selin Toprakkiran, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, United States

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