Manifold Threats to White Identity and Their Political Effects on White Partisans

Abstract

We investigate how threats to White identity operate among White Democrats and Republicans. We evaluate four identity threats that prior work has underexplored: distinctiveness threat (loss of unique ingroup attributes), power threat (perceiving outgroup collusion), morality threat (impugning an ingroup’s integrity), and meritocratic threat (questioning an ingroup’s advantages). We pinpoint which threats catalyze White identity among specific partisans—and with what political consequences. Leveraging a pre-registered experiment with 2,000 White Democrats and 2,000 White Republicans, we find most identity threats significantly catalyze White identity among all partisans at comparable intensity (d = .20). However, among White Democrats, a heightened sense of racial identity generates more downstream opposition to pro-outgroup policies (e.g., pathway to immigrant citizenship) and greater support for pro-ingroup policies (i.e., legacy college admissions) than among White Republicans. These indirect effects are highly robust and underscore White identity’s viability as a key mechanism behind contemporary partisan politics.