Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T00:17:57.476Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

How the Media Uses the Phrase “Identity Politics”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2022

Karyn Amira
Affiliation:
College of Charleston, USA
Alexander Abraham
Affiliation:
Unaffiliated, USA

Abstract

The phrase “identity politics” has experienced a recent surge in political discourse. However, its meaning varies for highly informed political groups, leaving the term definitionally vague for the general public. Second-level agenda-setting theory can be used to explain how this phrase is communicated to the public by the mass media, a crucial disseminator of political information. We used a quantitative content analysis of major US publications to examine the frequency of this phrase’s use and how it is presented to audiences. We found a surge in mentions beginning in 2016. We also found that it is tied more to the political Left, but there also is a fair amount of linkage to the political Right. The phrase also is portrayed negatively. We advocate for using political communication theories to track emerging political terms in the future.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, Joshua. 2020. “Colorlines.” Race Forward. www.colorlines.com/articles/how-woke-became-slur.Google Scholar
Albertson, Bethany. 2011. “Religious Appeals and Implicit Attitudes.” Political Psychology 32 (1): 109–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albertson, Bethany. 2015. “Dog-Whistle Politics: Multivocal Communication and Religious Appeals.” Political Behavior 37 (1): 326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, Sharon, Middleton, Richard, and Yon, Rachel. 2012. “The Effect of Racial Group Consciousness on the Political Participation of African Americans and Black Ethnics in Miami–Dade County, Florida.” Political Research Quarterly 65 (3): 629–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Badullovich, Nic, Grant, Will, and Colvin, Rebecca. 2020. “Framing Climate Change for Effective Communication: A Systematic Map.” Environmental Research Letters 15 (12): 123002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barreto, Matthew. 2007. “Isí Se Puede! Latino Candidates and the Mobilization of Latino Voters.” American Political Science Review 101 (3): 425–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, Mary. 2005. “Identity Politics.” Annual Review of Sociology 31:4774.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bow, Leslie, Brah, Avtar, Goeman, Mishuana, Harriford, Diane, Keating, Analouise, Lin, Yi-Chun Tricia, Pérez, Laura, et al. 2017. “Combahee River Collective Statement: A Fortieth Anniversary Retrospective.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 38 (3): 164–89.Google Scholar
Brooks, David. 2016. “Identity Politics Run Amok.” New York Times, September 2. www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/opinion/identity-politics-run-amok.html.Google Scholar
Butler, Daniel, and Broockman, David. 2011. “Do Politicians Racially Discriminate Against Constituents? A Field Experiment on State Legislators.” American Journal of Political Science 55 (3): 463–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caldwell, Christopher. 2016. “What the Alt-Right Really Means.” New York Times, December 2. www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/sunday/what-the-alt-right-really-means.html.Google Scholar
Carian, Emily, and Sobotka, Tagart Cain. 2018. “Playing the Trump Card: Masculinity Threat and the US 2016 Presidential Election.” Socius 4:2378023117740699.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Meredith. 2020. “DRAG THEM: A Brief Etymology of So-Called Cancel Culture.” Communication and the Public 5 (3–4): 8892.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collective, Combahee River. 1983. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, 264–74.Google Scholar
Conway, Mike. 2006. “The Subjective Precision of Computers: A Methodological Comparison with Human Coding in Content Analysis.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 83 (1): 186200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cunha, Evandro, Magno, Gabriel, Caetano, Josemar, Teixeira, Douglas, and Almeida, Virgilio. 2018. “Fake News as We Feel It: Perception and Conceptualization of the Term ‘Fake News’ in the Media.” In International Conference on Social Informatics, ed. Staab, Steffen, Koltsova, Olessia, and Ignatov, Dmitry I., 151–66. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawson, Michael. 1994. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Entman, Robert. 1993. “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.” Journal of Communication 43 (4): 5158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleiss, Richard J., and Koch, Gary G.. 1977. “The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data.” Biometrics 33 (1): 159–74.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Granath, Solvieg, and Ullén, Magnus. 2019. “The Elevation of Sensitivity over Truth: Political Correctness and Related Phrases in the Time Magazine Corpus.” Applied Linguistics 40 (2): 265–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, Steven. 1999. “Understanding Party Identification: A Social Identity Approach.” Political Psychology 20 (2): 393403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, Steven. 2004. “Social Identity Theory and Party Identification.” Social Science Quarterly 85 (1): 136–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jardina, Ashley. 2019. White Identity Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, Sei-Hill, Scheufele, Dietram A., and Shanahan, James. 2002. “Think About It This Way: Attribute Agenda-Setting Function of the Press and the Public’s Evaluation of a Local Issue.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79 (1): 725.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiousis, Spiro, Bantimaroudis, Philemon, and Ban, Hyun. 1999. “Candidate Image Attributes: Experiments on the Substantive Dimension of Second-Level Agenda Setting.” Communication Research 26 (4): 414–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knuckey, Jonathan, and Kim, Myunghee. 2020. “The Politics of White Racial Identity and Vote Choice in the 2018 Midterm Elections.” Social Science Quarterly 101 (4): 1584–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacombe, Matthew. 2019. “The Political Weaponization of Gun Owners: The National Rifle Association’s Cultivation, Dissemination, and Use of a Group Social Identity.” Journal of Politics 81 (4): 1342–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levendusky, Matthew, and Malhotra, Neil. 2016. “Does Media Coverage of Partisan Polarization Affect Political Attitudes?Political Communication 33 (2): 283301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Seth C., and Reese, Stephen D.. 2009. “What Is the War on Terror? Framing Through the Eyes of Journalists.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 86 (1): 85102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lilla, Mark. 2017. The Once and Future Liberal. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Masket, Seth. 2020. Learning from Loss: The Democrats, 2016–2020. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCombs, Maxwell E., Llamas, Juan Pablo, Lopez-Escobar, Esteban, and Rey, Federico. 1997. “Candidate Images in Spanish Elections: Second-Level Agenda-Setting Effects.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (4): 703–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCombs, Maxwell E., and Shaw, Donald L.. 1972. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (2): 176–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plutzer, Eric, and Zipp, John. 1996. “Identity Politics, Partisanship, and Voting for Women Candidates.” Public Opinion Quarterly 60 (1): 3057.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simon, Adam F. 2001. “A Unified Method for Analyzing Media Framing.” In Communication in U.S. Elections: New Agendas, ed. Hart, Roderick P. and Shaw, Daron R., 7589. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Weaver, David H. 2007. “Thoughts on Agenda Setting, Framing, and Priming.” Journal of Communication 57 (1): 142–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weigel, David. 2018. “Nationalism and Heckling Take Spotlight at Conservative Conference.” Washington Post, February 24. www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/nationalism-anti-immigration-rhetoric-take-spotlight-at-conservative-conference/2018/02/24/abe967ea-1988-11e8-92c9-376b4fe57ff7_story.html.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Amira and Abraham supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Amira and Abraham supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 127.9 KB