What is Americanness? Polarization and Consensus in Cultural Logics of the American Creed

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that political polarization has fractured the boundaries of U.S. national membership. Employing a novel empirical strategy that applies latent class modeling to conjoint data, we find evidence that both supports and complicates this narrative. On one hand, we identify five cultural logics of Americanness, three of which exhibit strong partisan alignment and represent sharply divergent conceptions of national belonging. On the other hand, we find that a majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, subscribe to hybrid conceptions of Americanness that incorporate both civic-oriented norms and ethnocultural criteria. We further find that attributes such as a college education and a multigenerational family history in the U.S. are associated with greater Americanness across all five cultural logics. These findings reveal substantial cross-partisan consensus on the contours of authentic national belonging, even within a fragmented media landscape that systematically exposes partisans to divergent information environments. One implication of our findings is that contemporary partisan conflict over what it means to be American reflects not only competing understandings of Americanness, but also contestation over who legitimately adheres to the national creed.