How Social Group Memberships Interact to Shape Partisanship, Policy Orientations, and Vote Choice

Individuals are members of multiple social groups (race, class, religion, etc.). Intersectionality theory contends we cannot understand the influence of a group in isolation because group identities interact to influence outcomes collectively. This assertion challenges the typical approach in the political behavior literature, which assumes the effects of group memberships are additive. In this paper, I correct this shortcoming. I test how racial and ethnic group memberships condition the impact of gender, religion, region, and social class on policy attitudes, partisanship, and vote choice. Using pooled ANES (2000–2016) and the 2016 CMPS data, I show that these group memberships’ effects are conditional upon race and ethnicity. They shape Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians’ political attitudes in diverse and, in some cases, opposite ways. The results imply that behavioral studies must be careful not to assume that group identities are additive instead of interactive. I conclude that quantitative scholars should account for the interactions of group identities in theoretical and empirical models.