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Article

Identity Sorting and Political Compromise

Nicholas T. Davis1

AbstractIn this article, I explore the relationship between sorting and the value that individuals assign to compromise. Analyzing four separate, nationally-representative surveys from 2007 to 2016, I show that a reliable asymmetry among partisans exists regarding their preference for political leaders who compromise. Among persons with right-leaning identities, high levels of overlap between partisanship and ideology undercut the professed desirability of compromise and amplify the association between compromise and selling out one’s principles. However, when individuals are asked about the specific extent to which one’s “side” deserves greater deference in the policymaking process, differences between persons with left- and right-leaning identities disappear. Well-sorted individuals are uniformly unwilling to distribute policymaking demands equally. Although this disconnect is emblematic of the general tension between abstract principles and episodic behavior (or “practicing what you preach”), it also highlights how the introduction of material threat may challenge expressive commitments to lofty ideals.

Keywordscompromise, sorting, social identities

Elections determine winners and losers, but, as Habermas (1994, p. 5) notes, “compromises make up the bulk of political processes.” Compromise, however, is often viewed as capitulation rather than an ideal feature

1Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:Nicholas T. Davis, Public Policy Research Institute, Texas A&M University, 4476 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843, USA. Email: ntdavis1017@gmail.com

799273 APRXXX10.1177/1532673X18799273American Politics ResearchDavisresearch-article2018

392 American Politics Research 47(2)

of deliberative political exchange. Although the mass public pays modest lip service to the notion that compromise is important, citizens often believe that their “side” is entitled to political deference (Pew Research Center, 2014). In other words, when it comes to compromising in practice—when individuals are required to belly up to the bargaining table to make hard choices about the distribution of resources in the policymaking process—the average person is less likely to compromise than they are in principle. Thus, Americans eschew “neutral” or “moderate” policy solutions (Ahler & Broockman, 2018), much less politicians who are willing to make such concessions (e.g., Grossman & Hopkins, 2016; Harbridge, Malhotra, & Harrison, 2014; Ryan, 2017).

Given that compromise involves intergroup exchange, how might identity sorting—the overlap between partisan and ideological group memberships—affect the value that individuals assign to compromise? In this article, I explore four separate surveys from 2007 to 2016 to analyze (a) the relation-ship between sorting and individuals’ support for elected officials who priori-tize compromise, (b) the belief that compromise is equivalent to selling out one’s principles, and (c) the way in which individuals distribute policymak-ing demands among competing parties. On balance, I find that when political identities overlap, individuals exhibit less support for elected officials who compromise and are more likely to convey that compromise violates their own personal principles, with one important caveat: This negative effect is asymmetric, isolated among persons with right- but not left-leaning political identities. However, when individuals are asked about the allocation of demands in the policymaking process, these differences in compromise pref-erences disappear. In this setting, well-sorted persons are uniformly likely to prioritize their group’s interests at the expense of the out-group. Thus, although some Americans idealize compromise as a political virtue, sorting is nevertheless associated with a tendency to prioritize in-group demands.

Compromise and the Role of Group Identity

Elected officials face the unenviable task of adjudicating the competing prefer-ences of citizens and converting them into mutually acceptable policy outputs. If representatives must balance majoritarian policymaking rules with policy options that faithfully adhere to their constituency’s desires, then some type of bipartisan negotiation is usually required to resolve these demands. Although some political compromises are, of course, undesirable in that they may violate a community’s standards, compromise is valued normatively as “an agreement in which all sides sacrifice something to improve on the status quo from their perspective, and in which sacrifices are at least partly determined by the other side’s will” (Gutmann & Thompson, 2012, p. 10). Thus, a willingness to

Davis 393

compromise buoys the shared trust and respect that are needed to effectively pursue self-governance in the face of irresolvable moral disagreement.

If political compromise is valuable for both pragmatic and ethical reasons, then why are individuals unwilling to pursue it? Although past work has shown that moral values (Ryan, 2017) and emotions affect compromise (Wolak & Marcus, 2007), conceivably, the intergroup structure of political bargaining contributes to whether individuals are willing to propose and accept compromise. Bar-Tal (2001), for example, shows that concern for the safety and well-being of one’s group may decrease a propensity to engage in compromise, in part because such power inequalities increase perceived threat. This finding fits more generally with realist theories of group behav-ior, which argue that group behavior is governed by the extent to which an in-group feels threatened by an out-group (e.g., Bazerman & Neale, 1992; Posen, 1993). In this telling, negotiation breaks down when group members view mutual decision making as a zero-sum game (Thompson, 1995). Research indicates, for example, that perceptions of group threat increase political intolerance (Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse, & Wood, 1995) and punitive and aggressive behaviors toward out-groups (Huddy, Feldman, Taber, & Lahav, 2005), which, in turn, decrease moderate political outcomes (Gordon & Arian, 2001).

Although this framework helps explain intergroup behavior in severe eth-nic conflicts, others argue that a similar intergroup dynamic characterizes interactions in American politics. Consider a recent editorial appearing in The New York Times, which likened Republicans’ and Democrats’ “zero-sum thinking” to the sectarian conflict between two branches of Islam:

Because whether you’re talking about Shiites and Sunnis—or Iranians and Saudis, Israelis and Palestinians, Turks and Kurds—a simply binary rule dominates their politics: “I am strong, why should I compromise? I am weak, how can I compromise? Are we all just Shiites and Sunnis now?” (Friedman, 2016)

Although a clear rhetorical exaggeration, recent work shows that political group memberships are extraordinarily binding. Citizens have difficulty in overcoming partisan biases in nonpolitical settings (e.g., Iyengar & Westwood, 2015), much less objectively adjudicating matters of public pol-icy (e.g., Harbridge et al., 2014).

Linking Identity Sorting to Compromise

The idea that social identities, generally, and political memberships, specifi-cally, restrict a willingness to compromise is rooted in social identity theory.

394 American Politics Research 47(2)

Social identities involve the incorporation of a particular group membership into an individual’s self-concept. According to Tajfel (1981), these identities comprise the combination of objective group membership with the subjective “value and emotional significance attached to [such] membership” (p. 255). Driven by a need for positive distinctiveness, individuals prioritize in-group interests and discriminate against out-group members – particularly when identity complexity is low (Roccas & Brewer, 2002; Brewer & Pierce, 2005).

Partisan identities fit this description (Greene, 1999; Huddy, Mason, & Aarøe, 2015). Not only do partisans favor in-group members, but partisan identification strongly biases how individuals interpret information (e.g., Bartels, 2002; Druckman, Peterson, & Slothuus, 2013; Iyengar & Westwood, 2015; Leeper & Slothuus, 2014). Partisans’ internalized sense of identity is intimately related to their group’s victories and defeats; it is personal, rooted deeply within an individual’s subconscious (Theodoridis, 2013).

In a similar respect, ideological or “liberal conservative” identity also reflects these qualities. Although ideology is often conceptualized in terms of individuals’ policy preferences, a growing body of research treats liberal conservative identification as a form of social identity (Devine, 2015; Kinder & Kalmoe, 2017; Malka & Lelkes, 2010). Like partisanship, ideo-logical identity corresponds to a group-based understanding of politics and reflects affective, symbolic attachments to the liberal and conservative labels. In turn, self-identification as an ideologue may constitute a social identity insofar as an individual’s self-perception as a liberal or conserva-tive is “experienced as a point of similarity with other in-group members and as a point of collective difference with out-group members” (Malka & Lelkes, 2010, p. 160).

Given that the mere categorization of oneself as a group member can gen-erate sufficient prejudice to reshape economic exchange (Tajfel, 1970), polit-ical compromise, which hinges at least minimally on some degree of material, psychological, or status loss, ought to be sensitive to the configuration of the underlying identities that structure intergroup relations. Although past research has examined the relationship between compromise and partisan-ship (Harbridge et al., 2014), political identities in the American context do not exist independent of each other. What happens to individuals’ attitudes toward compromise, then, when ideology and partisanship are well-sorted?

Recent research on sorting offers some insights to this relationship. First, perceived out-group dissimilarity is associated with higher rates of sorting and may, in turn, exacerbate evaluations of elites (Davis, 2018a). Second, Mason (2015, 2016) finds that greater overlap between political identities is associ-ated with affective bias toward out-group members. Third, Davis and Mason

Davis 395

(2016) show that these biases have pervasive behavioral ramifications: When individuals sort, they are less likely to support candidates of opposing parties (i.e., split their ticket).

In each of these cases, sorting seems to exacerbate in-group/out-group distinctions. In the context of attitudes toward compromise, identity sorting might decrease the value assigned to compromise among the well-sorted because intergroup bargaining requires a willingness to cede psychological or material group resources to an out-group. If the highly sorted are more likely to exhibit in-group loyalty and profess out-group bias, then sorting ought to decrease an individual’s preference for representatives who will compromise because such actions could translate to suboptimal in-group outcomes.

Data and Method

To explore how citizens think about compromise, I draw on four survey data-sets: the 2007 Pew News Interest Index (Pew NII), the 2012 American National Election Studies’ Evaluations of Government and Society Study (ANES EOGSS), the 2014 Pew Political Polarization and Typology survey (Pew PPT), and the 2016 ANES Time Series survey (ANES TS). Necessarily, because the questions fielded across surveys vary, the specifications of the forthcoming models vary slightly from one dataset to the next. What these surveys lack in common instruments, however, is a modest trade-off in com-parison to the value of the varying distributions of institutional power over the period of time in which the data were collected.1

Operationalizing Compromise

What do citizens think about compromise? One productive way to conceptu-alize these orientations is to distinguish between attitudes regarding compro-mise as a normative or social good—the value that individuals assign to the idea of compromise—and the extent to which they consent to it (i.e., their willingness to shoulder a bargaining partner’s demands).

A willingness to compromise. One of the primary ways that surveys operation-alize attitudes toward compromise involves asking respondents whether they like legislators who are willing to engage in compromise. Using a forced-choice, bipolar response set, a common survey question asks respondents about the trade-off between legislators who “stick to their principles” or “compromise to get things done.” In the Pew NII, the Pew PPT, and ANES TS, respondents are asked to choose between whether they “like elected offi-cials who stick to their positions,” coded 0, or “like elected officials who

396 American Politics Research 47(2)

make compromises with people they disagree with,” coded 1. The ANES EOGSS also employs a similar instrument, save that it specifies whether the elected official is a U.S. Representative or the President.

Conceivably, however, this question wording may force individuals to make an unnatural choice—perhaps individuals simultaneously value princi-ple and compromise and, thus, quasirandomly select a response when pressed to choose. Fortuitously, the Pew NII also included a Likert-style survey ques-tion that asked individuals whether they disliked (1) or liked (4) political lead-ers who are willing to compromise. Although the two instruments included in the Pew NII are only modestly correlated (r = .32), persons who prefer elected officials who compromise over ones who stick to their principles are generally more likely to say that they like officials who compromise a lot. Still, these different questions provide a valuable opportunity to test whether the relation-ship between sorting and compromise is a manifestation of a particular type of survey question or a more generalizable association.

Compromise and selling out. The items above assess whether individuals pri-oritize legislators who value cooperation or who resist compromise when their principles are violated. More generally, do individual personally feel that compromise requires hedging on their deeply rooted principles? In the 2016 ANES Time Series survey, respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the notion that compromising in politics is equivalent to selling out one’s principles. Responses to this question range from 0 = dis-agree strongly to 4 = agree strongly; higher scores imply that a person con-nects compromise to selling out one’s principles. About 35% of respondents convey that compromise involves betraying one’s principles, which is roughly the same split between responses categories observed on the legislative com-promise item. Curiously, however, attitudes toward legislative compromise and more specific attitudes regarding selling out one’s principles are also only weakly correlated (r = .28); individuals who prefer leaders who stick to their principles are about a half a standard deviation more likely to agree that compromise is equivalent to selling out.

Compromise and the distribution of demands. In contrast to attitudes toward compromise in the abstract, a final survey question captures how much defer-ence any one side should receive in a policy debate. Because successful pol-icy making often requires leveraging certain resources or favors to receive desirable concessions, we can assess the propensity of individuals to engage in practical instances of compromise by analyzing respondents’ attitudes toward their willingness to cede ground to their opponents during negotia-tions. To this end, the Pew PPT survey asks individuals to describe the

Davis 397

distribution of goods when political leaders engage in policymaking: “When Barack Obama and Republican leaders differ over the most important issues facing the country, where should things end up?” Responses to this item range from 0 = Barack Obama gets all demands to 100 = Republicans get all demands. The value 50, then, represents an equal distribution of the demands that both “sides” get during negotiations.

I fold responses to the above variable at the value “50.” Values on this new variable range from 0, or a preference for “pure compromise” where both sides yield equally, to 50, or a preference for uncompromising politics where one side receives all demands. As individuals transition from 0 to 50, the extent to which they believe that one side should receive total deference in the policymaking process increases. Thus, larger values can be interpreted by an aversion to an even or balanced trade. Although not case-specific like a single, real policy domain, this question nevertheless moves attitudes toward compromise from conceptual affinities to an actual allocation of demands. Furthermore, responses to this item are only modestly related to legislative preferences (r = –.14). In effect, this instrument appears to pick up on a dif-ferent facet of compromise than whether individuals prefer elected officials who prioritize and pursue compromise.

Table 1 summarizes the eight dependent variables detailed above. For comparability, all items have been rescaled momentarily to range from 0 to 1, such that higher values convey that an individual professes a procompromise response.2 Because past research suggests that Democrats and Republicans approach compromise differently (e.g., Grossman & Hopkins, 2016), I also break these scores out by partisanship. Democrats exhibit procompromise positions most broadly. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that, with respect to “selling out” and “liking” compromise, Independents’ and Republicans’ scores are essentially indistinguishable.3 Perhaps contrary to popular belief, “pure” Independents rarely exhibit the greatest propensity to prefer compro-mise over the alternative; the lone survey instrument on which they exhibit the strongest preference for compromise regards the distribution of demands in the policymaking process.

Identity Sorting

Prior research operationalizes identity sorting by measuring the overlap between ideological and partisan identification and then multiplying the resulting overlap score by the strength of those identities (Davis, 2018a, 2018b; Davis & Dunaway, 2016; Mason, 2015). I use an alternative, new approach that forgoes that multiplicative function. Here, the traditional seven-category partisanship instrument is first recoded to range from −3 = strong

398

Tab

le 1

. Su

mm

ary

of S

urve

y Q

uest

ions

Reg

ardi

ng C

ompr

omis

e.

Que

stio

nSu

rvey

M (

all

resp

onde

nts)

Dem

ocra

tsIn

depe

nden

tsR

epub

lican

s

Pref

er le

ader

s w

ho

com

prom

ise

2016

AN

ES0.

640.

740.

610.

5420

07 P

ew N

II0.

560.

650.

510.

4320

14 P

ew P

PT0.

590.

660.

590.

50Pr

efer

legi

slat

ors

who

com

prom

ise

2012

AN

ES

EOG

SS0.

660.

760.

510.

60

Pref

er p

resi

dent

s w

ho c

ompr

omis

e0.

640.

720.

490.

61

Com

prom

ise

is

selli

ng o

ut20

16 A

NES

0.51

0.56

0.46

0.46

Like

s co

mpr

omis

e20

07 P

ew N

II0.

740.

780.

690.

70O

ne (

my)

sid

e ge

ts

all d

eman

ds20

14 P

ew P

PT0.

780.

780.

860.

75

Not

e. V

aria

bles

hav

e be

en r

esca

led

to r

ange

from

0 t

o 1,

whe

re h

ighe

r va

lues

con

vey

grea

ter

affin

ity fo

r pr

ocom

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posi

tion.

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es a

re

wei

ghte

d by

sam

plin

g w

eigh

ts p

rovi

ded

in e

ach

resp

ectiv

e su

rvey

. AN

ES =

Am

eric

an N

atio

nal E

lect

ion

Stud

ies;

NII =

New

s In

tere

st In

dex;

PPT

=

Polit

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ariz

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n an

d T

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Davis 399

Democrat to 3 = strong Republican. Ideological self-placement is then reverse-coded so that it ranges from −3 = extremely conservative to 3 = extremely liberal. Subtracting ideological self-placement from partisanship means that sorted identities will receive higher (lower) monotonic values in the case of right-leaning and left-leaning identities, respectively. Thus, this yields scores that range along a continuum from −6 = strong Democrat/extremely liberal to 6 = strong Republican/extremely conservative, where the value 0 = extreme cross-cutting identities. This new index is then folded at 0 and rescaled to range from 0 to 1, where low values convey cross-cutting identities

Figure 1. Distribution of sorting scores across surveys.Note. Sorting scores comprise overlap between partisanship and ideology, multiplied by identity strength. Distribution of scores broken out by Democrat and Republican identification. Pew surveys ask five-category liberal conservative identification, which results in fewer response categories relative to the ANES measure. ANES = American National Election Studies; EOGSS = Evaluations of Government and Society Study; TS = Time Series; NII = News Interest Index; PPT = Political Polarization and Typology.

400 American Politics Research 47(2)

and higher scores convey overlap among strong identities. Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of this item across the four datasets.

The benefit of this measurement approach over past research is twofold. First, it allows the effect of identity overlap to vary by identity strength, which is important in the sense that the combinations of moderate/Independent and extremely liberal/strong Democrat, for example, both convey “perfect” over-lap yet are clearly different in substance. Second, unlike prevailing measures of sorting, this specification avoids multiplying overlap by identity strength, which generates an ordinal scale rather a monotonic, interval one.

Controlling for Alternative Explanations of Compromise

There are a number of covariates that might alternatively explain individuals’ orientations toward compromise for which we ought to account. One way of thinking about a resistance to compromise includes the extent to which indi-viduals possess one-sided policy preferences. Conceivably, consistent liberal or conservative policy preferences might explain dissatisfaction with com-promise because these sort of sophisticated preferences reflect the sort of rigidity that might work against compromise. In the Pew PPT survey, infor-mation on 10 issues was collected. For each policy item, individuals are given a pair of solutions from which to choose the statement that comes clos-est to their views. These statements effectively translate into a “conservative” and a “liberal” perspective, with a third option that comprises “both/neither/don’t know.” Selecting the conservative response on any given policy item is coded (+1), the liberal perspective (–1), and the neutral category (0). To con-struct a measure of one-sided issue preferences, I average these responses together and take the absolute value, thereby creating a scale that ranges from moderate or “counter-vailing” preferences (0) to one-sided preferences (1).4 Likewise, in the 2016 ANES TS, I construct a measure of one-sided issue preferences using the traditional seven-category placement items. Here, indi-viduals are asked to choose between a liberal (coded 1) and conservative policy prescription (coded 7) on a series of issues. Responses are averaged together, folded, and then rescaled to range from 0, weak or conflicting pref-erences, to 1, one-sided strong policy preferences.

Next, individuals with high levels of political knowledge may be more likely to understand that politics often requires compromise to achieve one’s ends and, therefore, may be more willing to value the pragmatism inherent in compromise. In the ANES EOGSS, political knowledge comprises an addi-tive index of correctly identifying the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the area in which the U.S. government spends the least

Davis 401

amount of money. In the Pew PPT survey, a political knowledge index accounts for correctly identifying which party enjoys House and Senate majorities, as well as which party prefers tax increases. In the 2016 ANES TS, I construct an index of political knowledge that includes whether an indi-vidual correctly places Democrats to the left of Republicans on four policy domains, in addition to whether a respondent correctly identifies the German Chancellor, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and which parties control the House and Senate. The resulting indices are coded consistently such that they range from 0 = no correct answers to 1 correctly answers all items, respectively.

Similar to the relationship between political knowledge and compromise, we might expect news consumption and political interest to be related to compromise insofar as those persons who pay greater attention to political events may be more likely to perceive that compromise is a social good. In the Pew NII, news interest is a composite of how closely an individual fol-lows a series of news items. Scores are average across the series of six items, where 0 conveys did not follow these items closely and 1 conveys follows all items carefully. In the ANES EOGSS, news consumption is simply the num-ber of days that a respondent watches or reads the news, ranging from 1 to 7. In the ANES TS, individuals are asked how frequently they follow politics in the news, which ranges from 0 = not at all to 1 = a great deal. In both ANES surveys, political interest is recoded to range from 0 not very interested to 1 = very interested.

A recent study of compromise also demonstrates its close relationship with moral values. Ryan (2017) shows how preferences grounded in strong moral convictions are much less malleable when it comes to compromising. In the ANES EOGSS, respondents were shown a list of 10 issues, of which they selected a “most” and “least” important issue facing the United States today. Next, they were queried whether these two issues and a third one selected at random were based on their moral values. Responses range from 1 = not at all to 5 = a great deal. Following Ryan (2017), I average these items together; ostensibly, persons who strongly connect their morals to issues may be displayed a lower baseline propensity to accept or value com-promise. Next, I also control, where possible, for individuals’ religious affili-ation. Individuals who consider themselves Evangelicals are coded 1 and otherwise 0. Identification as religiously secular or religious liberal is coded 1 and otherwise 0.

Finally, given prior research that connects group status and emotions to compromise, I also include a variable for out-group fear where possible. In the ANES TS, respondents are asked to what degree they feel afraid toward the parties. Using party identification to establish group status (i.e., in-group/out-group), out-group fear reflects the extent to which a person feels afraid of

402 American Politics Research 47(2)

the opposing party (for pure Independents, I average feelings of fear toward both parties). Responses range from 1 = never to 5 = always.

Results

To what degree does the overlap between partisan and ideological identities predict attitudes toward compromise? In the following sections, I first ana-lyze the relationship between sorting and a preference for whether elected officials ought to engage in compromise or reject policy solutions that might violate their principles. Then, I assess whether sorting affects how individu-als think about the relationship between compromise and their own princi-ples. Finally, I investigate the relationship between sorting and the extent to which individuals actually acquiesce to compromise in practice.

A Willingness to Compromise

Across the four surveys analyzed here, respondents were given a variation of a question asking whether they liked officials/elected representatives who “compromise” (1) or “stick to their principles” (0). Table 2 presents a series of logistic regression models that depict these responses as a function of sorting and a series of controls (for brevity, the full package of demographic controls for each respective model is relegated to the supplemental appendix). In Models 1, 3, 5, and 7, the coefficient associated with sorting is always negative, modest in size, and usually distinguishable from 0. On balance, individuals whose partisan and liberal conservative identities overlap exhibit a lower propensity to prefer a legislator who will compromise relative to one that sticks to their principles.

Recalling that compromise preferences varied among Democrats and Republicans (Table 1), Models 2, 4, 6, and 8 depict a preference for compro-mise as a function of sorting and a dummy variable for collapsed partisan identity (Republican = 1, Democrat = 0). As the coefficients associated with this interaction term reveal, the relationship between sorting and a preference for compromise is more nuanced than the base models indicate. As Figure 2 illustrates, the effect of sorting on comprise in these models is asymmetric.5 When partisans possess cross-cutting identities, Republican and Democratic identifiers’ preferences for compromise are indistinguishable; on balance, all weakly sorted or cross-pressured persons prefer legislators who compromise over ones that stick to their principles.

As sorting increases, however, prominent differences in these preferences manifest. At maximum levels of sorting, Democrats exhibit a greater pen-chant for legislators who compromise relative to well-sorted Republicans.

403

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Davis 405

This pattern generalizes across the full series of surveys, although the coef-ficient for sorting among Democrats in 2007 and 2016 is negative and posi-tive in the 2012 EOGSS and 2014 Pew PPT. These contrasting effects notwithstanding, across the four surveys, a well-sorted Democrat never exhibits a predicted probability of preferring principles over compromise that exceeds 0.50. In contrast, as strong Republican and conservative identities coalesce, respondents uniformly exhibit less interest in compromise irrespec-tive of the “official” in question. Furthermore, at maximal levels of

Figure 3. Predicted probability for liking/disliking compromise.Source. 2007 Pew News Interest Index; originating regression available in Appendix, Table A5.Note. Values “0” and “1.0” correspond to maximally cross-cutting and sorted identities, respectively. Value 0.50 conveys that an individual possesses a maximally “strong” partisan identity, coupled with “moderate” self-placement on the ideology scale. Point estimates are bracketed by 95% confidence intervals.

406 American Politics Research 47(2)

partisan-ideological sorting, Republicans are very unlikely to prefer legisla-tors who compromise.6

Perhaps, however, this forced-choice response set requires persons with right-leaning identities to render an unrealistic or unnatural choice. Indeed, it may be possible to divorce a willingness to compromise from a penchant for sticking with one’s principles (i.e., perhaps some citizens believe that compromise and principle adherence are good). In a separate survey instrument, the 2007 Pew NII asked individuals how much they “liked” legislators who were willing to compromise. Using estimates derived from an ordered logistic regression, I plot the probability of selecting two of the

Figure 4. The effect of sorting on the belief that compromise violates one’s principles.Source. 2016 ANES TS; originating regression available in Appendix, Table A6.Note. Values “0” and “1.0” correspond to maximally cross-cutting and sorted identities, respectively. Value 0.50 conveys that an individual possesses a maximally “strong” partisan identity, coupled with “moderate” self-placement on the ideology scale. Point estimates bracketed by 95% confidence intervals.

Davis 407

four possible outcomes regarding whether individuals like compromise in Figure 3. For all cross-pressured partisans, the relationship between sort-ing and compromise preferences is extremely noisy; the overlapping con-fidence intervals imply few differences among Democrats and Republicans.7 However, partisans who possess well-sorted political identities do exhibit distinct preferences. Whereas sorting among those with left-leaning identi-ties is associated with no meaningful changes in liking compromise “a lot” (left panel), persons with right-leaning identities exhibit a large decrease in the probability of selecting that response. Similarly, the second panel bears the contours of this relationship out: Well-sorted Republicans are more likely to communicate that they dislike compromise.8 This finding corroborates the idea that sorting among Republicans is reliability associ-ated with more negative views toward compromise, irrespective of response format.

Compromise and Selling Out One’s Principles

Across four separate surveys, collected over a span of almost a decade, the results depicted in the previous section are consistent: Sorting among those with right-leaning political identities is correlated with a reduction in the preference for elected officials who put compromise before their principles. To what degree, however, does sorting affect whether or not individuals believe that compromise undercuts their own principles? The survey items analyzed in the previous section juxtaposed pragmatic with principled poli-cymaking. Does sorting affect whether individuals personally feel that com-promise results in selling out their own principles?

Recall that responses to that survey item range from “strongly disagreeing” that compromise is selling out, coded 0, to “strongly agreeing” that it is selling out your principles, coded 4. On balance, the average American does not view compromise as selling out his or her principles (M = 1.97, s.e. = 0.02). Opting for a visual depiction of these effects, Figure 4 plots a series of estimates derived from an ordered logistic regression regarding whether or not compromise is linked to selling out one’s principles. Again, the evidence suggests that sorting undercuts the positivity of these attitudes, albeit in an asymmetric manner. Although the probability of selecting either response is modest (most respon-dents fall somewhere in the middle response categories), persons with left-lean-ing identities are more likely to communicate that compromise and the integrity of one’s principles are mutually compatible (left panel). In contrast, maximal sorting among individuals with right-leaning identities predictably increases the likelihood of connecting compromise to selling out one’s principles (right panel).

408 American Politics Research 47(2)

Compromise and the Distribution of Political Demands

Thus far, these findings indicate that identity sorting is related to individuals’ orientations toward compromise as a social good, conditional on whether a person belongs to left- or right-leaning groups. However, when it comes to the practical business of politics—that is, when individuals are actually required to acknowledge the extent to which they are willing to forego resources to achieve their preferred political goals—do we observe that the contours of this one-sided effect persist? We do not.

Recalling that the 2014 Pew PPT asked whether the (Democratic) President and (Republican) Congress ought to receive equal demands when bargaining

Figure 5. The relationship between sorting and ceding resources to out-group demands.Source. 2014 Pew Polarization and Political Typology Survey.Note. Dependent variable asks, “When Barack Obama and Republican leaders differ over the most important issues facing the country, where should things end up?” Responses are recoded so that the value “0” represents an even distribution of demands and higher values (anchored at “50”) convey a preference for one-sided demands. Point estimates are bracketed by 95% confidence intervals. Originating regression available in Appendix, Table A7. PPT = Political Polarization and Typology.

Davis 409

(low values) or whether one set of actor(s) relative the other should receive all their demands in the policymaking process (high values), we can explore the relationship between sorting and a practical iteration of “compromise.”9 Figure 5 illustrates that the asymmetry observed in the preceding sections disappears. Unlike the previous set of questions, which couched compromise in a more abstract, decontextualized frame, here, those persons with left-lean-ing identities are no more or less likely to accept 50/50 solutions to policy-making than those with right-leaning identities. When individuals’ ideological and partisan identities converge under conditions of having to cede demands to the out-group (i.e., when threatened), well-sorted group members appear uniformly less likely to accept policymaking solutions that resemble an “even” compromises.

Discussion and Conclusion

When individuals self-categorize as group members, they are prone to exag-gerate the positive aspects of their in-group and denigrate the group(s) to which they do not belong (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). If sorting amplifies these distinctions (Davis, 2018a; Mason, 2015), then negotiating with an out-group may seem less attractive for individuals with overlapping political identities. Yet, well-sorted individuals do not uniformly reject compromise—at least in principle. Sorted persons with left-leaning identities value legislators who compromise, whereas those with right-lean-ing identities do not. Why?

Consider first the institutional structure of the parties. Historically, the Republican Party has been described as unitary and hierarchical, where purity, deference, and loyalty to the party are prioritized and members are bound together by common ideological principles.10 In contrast, the Democratic Party is more pluralistic and polycentric, comprised a coalition of constituencies with varying social, economic, and political demands (Freeman, 1986; Grossman & Hopkins, 2016). Although these characteristics may be important insofar as they have produced sharply divergent motiva-tions in policymaking, the underlying ideological tension between these groups regards the role of the state. If compromise inevitably involves some nontrivial expansion of the state’s reach—then principle adherence may be preferable to compromise among those on “the right.”

These institutional differences, however, do not exist in a vacuum. Recent meta-analyses by Jost, Sterling, Rule and Stern (2017) and Baron and Jost (n.d.) summarize a large body of studies that show that epistemic motivations among conservatives and liberals differ. The latter notes that

410 American Politics Research 47(2)

liberals generally score higher than conservatives on measures of integrative complexity, cognitive refection, need for cognition, and uncertainty tolerance, whereas conservatives score higher than liberals on measures of personal needs for order and structure, cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity, cognitive/perceptual rigidity, and dogmatism (6).

It is plausible that the asymmetric preferences for compromise among Democrats and Republicans depicted here fit well within this framework.

Yet, how do we square this explanation with the finding that sorting is uniformly associated with a decreased willingness to cede resources to out-groups? The distribution of institutional power does not necessarily explain this disconnect. Whereas Democrats controlled neither the Presidency nor Congress in 2007, in each of the other three survey years, they controlled the Presidency and the Senate. Over this period of time, the contours of the rela-tionship between sorting and the value assigned to compromise among per-sons with left-leaning identities remains mostly consistent.

Instead, consider how the question regarding the distribution of demands introduces material threat. Out-group hostility has been shown to increase when a group’s status is threatened (Riek, Mania, & Gaertner 2006), and political identities, in particular, can be activated under conditions of threat (e.g. Huddy et al., 2015). Given that survey questions regarding the value of legislative compromise are absent the type of threat that accompanies the question about the distribution of policymaking demands, it is possible that that decontextualized frame doesn’t trigger the same epistemic needs asso-ciated with group memberships (e.g., Kruglanski et al., 2006).

Moving forward, we might ponder whether it matters normatively that compromise is valued asymmetrically if sorting uniformly bedevils how indi-viduals think about the distribution of policymaking demands. Intergroup tensions are a persistent feature of American politics (most recently: Mason, 2018) and motivational biases seem to be evenly distributed across ideologi-cal groups (Ditto et al., 2018; see also Collins, Crawford, and Brandt, 2017 for evidence of ideological symmetries). If compromise is foundational to the sustainability of democratic exchange (Gutmann & Thompson, 2012), then additional (experimental) research is sorely needed to assess the extent to which sorting causally undercuts individuals’ willingness to settle differences by consenting to mutual concessions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Davis 411

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-cation of this article.

Notes

1. Although the 2016 ANES asked questions regarding compromise after the presi-dential election outcome was known, whether these trends continue over the Trump administration’s tenure is a question that future research will have to address.

2. Here, the mean values for the dichotomous “leaders who compromise” items can be interpreted as the proportion of persons who literally “prefer compromise” over “sticking to principles.”

3. When modeling the effect of sorting on compromise, however, I exclude pure Independents from analysis in the main body of the text. The most common ideological self-placement for pure Independents is “moderate,” and these respondents almost uniformly prefer compromise at the same rates as maximally cross-pressured partisans. Pure Independents who identify as very conservative (liberal) are rare but are essentially indistinguishable from Republican identi-fiers at the mid-point of the sorting scale. I point interested readers to Figure A2 for further details regarding those relationships, but note that the inclusion of pure Independents does not change the substantive results of the forthcoming analyses.

4. Of course, this measure is not reflective of policy-based ideology insofar as equal preferences for liberal and conservative policies can offset, producing a “moderate” score when an individual really possesses sharply countervailing issue preferences. However, I still expect that this type of measure is a reasonable proxy for ideological thinking—in part because individuals with either purely “moderate” or inconsistent preferences (mismatched liberal and conservative preferences) should be less likely to avoid compromise than individuals who possess consistent “ideological” preferences. Thus, this metric merely assesses whether strong, unidirectional policy preferences undercut compromise relative countervailing or weak ones.

5. These estimates are statistically differentiable from each other. See Figure A2. 6. Given that these surveys cover a period of time that included unified (Republican

President and Congress) and divided government (Democratic President and Senate and a Republican House), it is not clear that the contours of the rela-tionship between sorting and compromise are rooted wholly in the winner–loser framework. Instead, it seems to be the case that there are genuine differences among partisans with respect to how sorting relates to comrpomise preferences.

7. Indeed, although fully cross-pressured Republicans seem to exhibit slightly more procompromise attitudes than cross-pressured Democrats, only 16 Republican respondents comprise that category (or less than 3% of all respondents).

8. These differences are statistically significant, as Figure A3 bears out.

412 American Politics Research 47(2)

9. Although a reasonable criticism of this question regards core agenda-based dif-ferences relative Congress and the President, the juxtaposition between the two groups at this point in time presents a plausible in-group/out-group scenario to exploit.

10. Although some may push back against this depiction, recent political events would suggest the characterization is not unfair. Although members of the GOP have publicly criticized the 45th President of the United States, roll-call vote esti-mates suggest that few Republican legislators have diverged from Mr. Trump’s agenda.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material is available for this article online.

ORCID iD

Nicholas T. Davis https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0039-0817

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Author Biography

Nicholas T. Davis is an assistant research scientist at the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University. His research explores ideology, broadly, with emphases on party sorting and the structure of democratic attitudes, specifically.