IDENTITY, EMOTION, DIVISION: Perspectives on the Trump Era from Cincinnati, Ohio

Abstract

In this thesis, I propose that identity and emotion play an important role in understanding the way political beliefs shaped the 2016 United States presidential election. Previous sociological scholarship has demonstrated that identity influences political beliefs. Hochschild recently demonstrated the influence of emotion within conservative political narratives. I add to these accounts a focus on the social and work-related identities that ground emotions, drawing on existing literature on group identity, emotion, and dignity to enrich the analysis. Through in- depth interviews conducted with men in Cincinnati, Ohio, a critical battleground region, I find that support for Trump was driven by his perceived validation of certain identities, his activation of emotions, and social group influence. I argue that the enhanced roles of identity and emotion in politics—as well as the feelings that link them, such as dignity and respect—help to explain the growing polarization and partisan divide in the U.S.