An “Identity Turn” in political communication?: testing the relationship between media use and identity alignment in the United States

Abstract

Despite a rise in identity-centric communication scholarship, there is a lack of theory and evidence regarding how media use relates to the on-going alignment between political and social identities (i.e., identity alignment). We offer a framework for theorizing this dynamic and apply it to examine the relationship between Americans’ media diets and on-going psychological alignment between political and social identities in the United States (i.e., partisan social sorting). We use data from 33,690 American respondents from three national surveys: one longitudinal (1972–2020) and two fielded in 2020. There is evidence that identity alignment (i.e., sorting) has grown over time, but only among those who are most interested and attentive to politics and media. In 2020 surveys, we find no evidence that the frequency of media use was a significant predictor of social sorting. Instead, the composition of individuals’ media diets predicted the alignment between their social and political identities.