SOME Democrats blamed identity politics for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016. Mark Lilla,a historian from Columbia University, suggested in the New York Times that Democratic identity politics “encouraged white, and rural,devout Americans to assume of themselves as a deprived group.” But new research suggests that identity politics is not a phenomenon primarily connected to the Democratic Party. Social and cultural identity is more closely tied to partisan support among Republicans.
Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly polarised in terms of their racial, devout and ideological makeup. Blacks, and Hispanics and the non-devout have sorted into the Democratic Party,while whites, evangelical Christians, and conservatives have tended to join the Republican Party. Between 1992 and 2016 the percentage of white men registered to vote who identified as Republican rose from 48% to 61% and the share of those who were registered Democrat fell from 44% to 31%,according to the Pew Research...
Continue reading
Source: economist.com