How far does social group influence reach? Identities, elites, and immigration attitudes

Identification with a social group can operate as a powerful heuristic, allowing an individual to easily make political judgments. But, a person can identify with multiple groups, which may be mobilized toward different political ends. How do opinions and behaviors change when a person’s identities are in competition with each other, creating cross-pressures? The Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT)–a broad coalition of evangelical Christian leaders supporting liberal immigration policies–has been working to mobilize evangelical Christians on immigration; however, many evangelical Christians also hold competing partisan identities that push them to maintain their existing conservative immigration opinions. Using both experimental and panel data, I show that the EIT can influence evangelicals’ immigration attitudes; however, these changes in attitudes do not correspond to an increased willingness to act politically in support of reform. Instead, I find the EIT has been more successful at demobilizing evangelical opponents of immigration reform. ∗Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania. E-mail: [email protected]. Support for the experimental data collected in this paper came from the National Science Foundation and the MIT Political Experimental Research Lab. I am extremely grateful to Michelle Torres Pacheco, Steven Smith, Betsy Sinclair, and Patrick Tucker for their generosity and help with the TAPS panel data. For helpful comments and suggestions on the paper, I thank Adam Berinsky, Nyron Crawford, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Shana Kushner Gadarian, Daniel Gillion, Gabe Lenz, Matthew Levendusky, Krista Loose, Christopher Muste, and Adam Ziegfeld. Additional thanks to Alfredo Gonzalez, Ethan Porter, and Adam Ziegfeld for assistance in creating the radio advertisements. And thank you to Napp Nazworth and Matthew Soerens for their time and expertise. Any remaining errors are my own. Cohesive political blocs are often forged from existing social groups. Group leaderswhether religious figures, union organizers, or community activists-serve as liaisons between social and political worlds, providing voters with cues as to how their identification with a particular group should translate into political preferences and activities. This political activation of social identities can create highly unified political blocs as group members bound together by shared beliefs and outlooks mobilize behind a common political cause (Lewis-Beck et al. 2008; Miller et al. 1981; Simon and Klandermans 2001). But, a person can belong to multiple groups and hold multiple identities, which may be mobilized toward different political ends. Although many scholars have explored how a person’s identity can shape her political beliefs and actions, less is known about how opinions and behaviors change when someone’s identities are in competition with each other, creating strong cross-pressures. To understand how social identities interact politically, I look at a particular instance in which two identities–political and religious–that frequently operate in concert provide conflicting attitudinal cues. On the one hand, having a partisan identity is akin to being a part of a political team (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002), and partisan identities can operate as “enduring” commitments (Campbell et al. 1960) that shape the way partisans view and interpret the world (Bartels 2002). The research on religious identites’ relationship with political attitudes, on the other hand, is also well documented (Campbell et al. 1960; Djupe and Gilbert 2009; Guth et al. 2006). So how does partisanship compete against another salient social identity that we know matters for political attitudes? The Evangelical Immigration Table offers an opportunity to answer this question. Since its inception in 2013, the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT)–a broad coalition of over 140 evangelical Christian leaders and groups in support of comprehensive immigration reform–has both been urging Congress to pass progressive immigration policies and working to rally evangelical Christians under the banner of immigration reform. The EIT’s aim is to activate religious identities to change political attitudes; however, most of the EIT’s intended audience also holds a competing partisan identity that pushes them toward a very different