October 12, 2016
Samara Klar (University of Arizona)
American partisans hold strong preferences for members of their own party and even express personal distrust towards members of the opposing party. Nevertheless, other group memberships exist simultaneously – such as race, ethnicity, or gender – and these identities cut across partisanship. When Democrats and Republicans share a common social identity does this engender trust between them, or does it fuel further distrust? Relying on economic theories of identity loss and literature on the origins of inter-group rivalry, I theorize and demonstrate that when policies are framed in terms of gender, sharing a common gender identity in fact exacerbates distrust between female Democrats and Republicans. This study includes three experiments conducted on a sample of 2,100 American women. The findings hold direct implications for the influence of women in political positions and it provides new advances into our understanding of how rivals with cross-cutting identities interact in political settings.