A Matter of Morality: Evidence That Ideological Labels Generate More Polarized Judgments Than Other Social Identities

Abstract

Growing political polarization in the United States has called into question the traditional view that ideological self-identification is a weak social attachment. To test this argument, I propose a new measurement of identity strength: the use of moral language. Results across two samples -- a dataset of over 40,000 tweets and an experiment -- show that ideology is more strongly associated with morality than five other social identities: partisanship, race, religion, sexual orientation, and sports affiliation. Moreover, ideological extremity is predictive of moral judgment. These findings contradict previous theories of political identification by showing that ideological labels are a polarized, relatively strong social identity.