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The Partisan Sorting of 'America': How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

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The Partisan Sorting of 'America': How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election The Partisan Sorting of `America': How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election∗ Bart Bonikowski New York University Yuval Feinstein University of Haifa Sean Bock Harvard University ∗Funding for this research was provided by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Bonikowski and Feinstein), the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Bonikowski), the Harvard University Dean's Fund for Innovation (Bonikowski), and the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (Feinstein). We are grateful for helpful feedback from Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Marco Garrido, Steve Morgan, Paul Pierson, Jeff Manza, Sarah Roberts, audiences at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, Stony Brook, NYU, MIT, APSA, and ASA, and participants in the 2019 CIFAR Successful Societies Workshop. Direct correspondence to Bart Bonikowski, Puck Building, Room 4143, 295 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012; [email protected]. 1 ABSTRACT: Political scientists have acknowledged the importance of nation- alism as a constitutive element of radical-right politics, but have typically em- pirically reduced the phenomenon to its downstream attitudinal correlates. Soci- ologists, on the other hand, have extensively studied nationalism, but have only sporadically engaged in debates about institutional politics. In this study, we bring these literatures together by considering how nationalist beliefs shaped re- spondents' voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalism in the U.S. population. The results suggest that competing understandings of American nationhood were effectively mobilized by candidates from the two par- ties, both in the 2016 primaries and the general election. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, nationalism has become sorted by party, as Republican iden- tifiers have come to define America in more exclusionary and critical terms and Democrats have increasingly endorsed inclusive and positive conceptions of na- tionhood. These trends point to the rising demand for radical candidates among Republicans and suggests a potentially bleak future for U.S. politics, as national- ism becomes yet another among multiple overlapping social and cultural cleavages that serve to reinforce partisan divisions and undermine the stability of liberal democratic institutions. Introduction There is an emerging consensus in the political science and sociology literature that contemporary radical-right politics|a category that subsumes most European right- wing parties, but also Donald Trump's presidency, and the Brexit referendum| consists of three constitutive elements: populism, exclusionary nationalism, and au- thoritarianism (Bonikowski 2017a; Mudde 2007; Rooduijn 2014)1. While much recent 1The technical term \radical right" is commonly used in the literature and is preferable to other labels that conflate the form of politics in question with one of its ideological components (e.g., \populism") or that privilege one component over others (e.g.,\populist radical right"). We rely on it in the paper for this reason. At the same time, we acknowledge that the \radical right" label is problematic, because 2 research has sought to define, measure, and examine the political consequences of populist attitudes (Akkerman et al. 2014; Oliver and Rahn 2016; Schulz et al. 2017; Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel 2018), the careful theorization and operationaliza- tion of nationalist beliefs has received comparably less attention, as has the study of the relationship between nationalism and political preferences. Instead, political scientists have focused on downstream phenomena that comprise what they call \cul- tural" factors explaining radical-right support. These include xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-cosmopolitan backlash. In this paper, we address this gap in the literature by bringing insights from cultural and political sociology to the study of institutional politics. Specifically, we use original survey data to inductively identify multiple varieties of popular American nationalism and examine their re- lationship to respondents' voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential primary and general elections. We then rely on repeated cross-sectional surveys of nationalist attitudes administered in 1996, 2004, 2012, 2014, and 2016 to investigate whether long-term trends in the distribution of nationalist beliefs, both in the aggregate and across the two U.S. national parties, help account for Donald Trump's rise to political prominence. Our analyses reveal that four distinct types of American nationalism, which we la- bel creedal, disengaged, restrictive, and ardent (cf. Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016), played an important role in the 2016 presidential election. Each of these four nation- it assumes a single political continuum that cannot account, for instance, for parties that combine economic redistribution with exclusionary nationalism. We also note that our use of the term is not normative or pejorative, in that it does not conflate all right-wing politics with the radical right, nor does it preclude the existence of a radical left, which carries its own particular political challenges. 3 alism types represents a unique combination of 23 variables measuring strength of national attachment, inclusive or exclusionary criteria of legitimate national mem- bership, domain-specific national pride, and chauvinism (i.e., the belief that America is superior to other countries). Importantly, in terms of their attitudinal composi- tion, the resulting nationalism types are cross-cutting rather than monotonic, so that they cannot be arranged on a single continuum from least to most nationalist. To aid in the interpretation of our arguments|and foreshadow our subsequent empir- ical findings—we illustrate the composition of the nationalist schemas in terms of their four constitutive components (i.e., attachment, membership criteria, pride, and chauvinism) in Table 1. Even after controlling for sociodemographic covariates and partisan identification, adherence to restrictive and ardent nationalism (both are exclusionary, but the former is characterized by moderate national attachment and low levels of national pride and chauvinism, and the latter by high levels of all three) was significantly predictive of endorsing Trump over the moderate candidates in the Republican primary and of voting for Trump over Clinton in the general election. Moreover, a disengaged disposition toward the nation (consisting of inclusive criteria of belonging and low levels of attachment, pride, and chauvinism) was predictive of support for Sanders over Clinton in the Democratic primary, and for Trump over Clinton in the general election. These results are placed into further relief by a striking finding from our longitudinal analysis: while the three conceptions of America associated with Trump support did not become more prevalent in the U.S. population prior to the 2016 election, there is strong evidence of persistent partisan sorting of nationalist beliefs 4 Table 1: Summary of the distribution of constitutive nationalism attitudes across the four types of nationalism (creedal, disengaged, ardent, and restrictive) Nationalist Attitudes (23 variables grouped into four dimensions) Nationalism Types Attachment Membership Criteria Pride Chauvinism (latent classes) Creedal Moderate Inclusive High Moderate Disengaged Moderate Inclusive Low Low Ardent High Exclusionary High High Restrictive High Exclusionary Low Moderate over the past two decades. Whereas the four varieties of nationalism observed in our study had cut across partisan identification in 1996, by 2016, respondents identifying with the Republican Party predominantly subscribed to exclusionary, unproud, and chauvinistic conceptions of nationhood, while a large majority of those identifying with the Democratic Party saw the nation in inclusive and positive terms. These results point to the centrality of nationalist beliefs in contemporary U.S. politics. Differences in popular conceptions of nationhood appear to have trans- formed over time from latent cultural cleavages|correlated with political attitudes but not primarily driving political behavior|to active political cleavages that have been effectively mobilized by recent presidential campaigns, most successfully so by Donald Trump's exclusionary and anti-elite appeals. Moreover, although nationalist beliefs are not reducible to partisanship (as evidenced by the persistent marginal effects of nationalism in our statistical models), the increasing correlation between these two types of identities is likely to reinforce other sociodemographic and ideo- 5 logical cleavages, potentially leading to greater partisan animosities and diminished prospects for political compromise in the coming years (Manza and Brooks 1999; Rokkan and Lipset 1967; Mason 2018; Jardina 2019). The paper proceeds as follows. We begin with a discussion of existing explana- tions for the rise of radical-right politics and argue that scholars have not sufficiently engaged with the sociological literature on popular nationalism, a crucial political- cultural phenomenon that is likely to have played a key role in the 2016 U.S. presi- dential election. Following a description of our data and methods, we use latent class analysis to identify four distinct varieties of American nationalism among our survey respondents. Based on the content of these attitudinal configurations, we develop hypotheses
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