Attitude networks as intergroup realities: Using network-modelling to research attitude-identity relationships in polarized political contexts [The political right has a lot more ideological diversity than the political left]

Abstract We apply a newly developed attitude network-modelling technique (Response-Item Network, or ResIN) to study attitude–identity relationships in the context of hot–button issues that polarize the current US-American electorate. The properties of the network–method allow us to simultaneously depict differences in the structural organization of attitudes between groups and to explore the relevance of organized attitude–systems for group identity management. Individuals based on a sample of US-American crowd workers (N = 396) and the representative 2020 ANES data set (N = 8280), we model an attitude network with two conflictive partisan belief-systems. In the first step, we demonstrate that the...