Heterogeneity and Convergence in Cultural Logics of Americanness

Abstract

Recent scholarship argues that rapid demographic changes and heightened political polarization have inflamed tensions over the boundaries of U.S. national membership along demographic and partisan lines. Our study offers an important caveat to this narrative. Using a novel empirical strategy that applies latent class modelling to data from a conjoint survey experiment, we find that different subsets of the American population use different cultural logics to sketch the symbolic contours of nationhood. However, these heterogeneous logics are not meaningfully patterned by standard indicators of sociocultural difference: most Democrats and Republicans—as well as most White, Black, Latino, and Asian Americans—evince a cultural logic of Americanness that fuses both ethnocultural criteria (e.g., race and religion) and civic-oriented expectations (e.g., voting and educational attainment) for membership in America’s imagined community. More substantively, our findings suggest that once boundary-making decisions are divorced from declarative beliefs or modes of self-theorization, Americans’ partisan identities and demographic attributes are tenuously linked to their intuitions about who belongs to the American creed.