The CSDC Speaker Series Presents:
“When Common Identities Decrease Trust: An Experimental Study of Democratic and Republican Women”
Professor Samara Klar (University of Arizona)
You can learn more about Professor Klar by clicking here.
Abstract:
American partisans hold strong preferences for members of their own party and even express personal distrust towards members of the opposing party. Nevertheless, other group memberships exist simultaneously – such as race, ethnicity, or gender – and these identities cut across partisanship. When Democrats and Republicans share a common social identity does this engender trust between them, or does it fuel further distrust? Relying on economic theories of identity loss and literature on the origins of inter-group rivalry, I theorize and demonstrate that when policies are framed in terms of gender, sharing a common gender identity in fact exacerbates distrust between female Democrats and Republicans. This study includes three experiments conducted on a sample of 2,100 American women. The findings hold direct implications for the influence of women in political positions and it provides new advances into our understanding of how rivals with cross-cutting identities interact in political settings.
Bio: Samara Klar is the Assistant Professor, School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. She studies how individuals’ identities — the groups, roles, and associations with which they identify — influence their political attitudes and behavior. She uses experimental methods (in and outside the lab), survey analyses, and other statistical tools to learn about the political consequences of our multiple and, at times, conflicting identities. Her book, Independent Politics, (co-authored with Yanna Krupnikov) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.
The talk will be in English.
This series is sponsored by the Inter-university Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (https://csdc-cecd.ca/) which is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).