Effects of Political Ideology on Perceptions of Group Ideology

Party polarization is increasing and is especially evident in American politics. Among normal, everyday people, however, there is less clarity about how this affects their daily lives. While it may be obvious that many Democrats do not like most Republicans and many Republicans do not like most Democrats, it is not obvious how these internal biases and group identifications within partisanship affect how people see others. The gap in current research is how phenomena such as negative polarization and affective polarization can extend onto people’s social identities. More specifically, my research question asks how individuals’ political ideologies and partisanship affect their perspectives of others’ political ideologies and partisanship. To test this relationship, I relied on an original Qualtrics survey that assessed how people evaluated the ideology of groups associated with each major political party. I found that sorted partisans were more likely than unsorted partisans to project more extreme ideologies. This research argues that partisanship stereotypes are extended to broad groups of people outside of the parties themselves.