Americans, not Partisans

Levendusky shows that you can measurably reduce partisan dislike by encouraging “American” as the salient identity instead of “Democrat” or “Republican.” Using a combination of survey and real-world natural experiments, he finds consistent reductions in affective polarization: respondents rate the opposing party and its leaders a couple points warmer, with no change toward their own side. The mechanism follows the Common Ingroup Identity Model, suggesting that if “American” becomes the in-group, the other party is reclassified from enemy to fellow citizens. 

For Tideline, this is direct evidence that a civic patriotism frame is not simply an issue of semantics; rather, ideals such as patriotism, shared rituals, and service-oriented practices are empirically associated with reductions in interpartisan hatred.