Abstract
Several scholars have called upon social identity theory to investigate the relationship between an American national identity and American public opinion on immigration. Lacking a uniform measure of American identity, by and large, scholars find that a two-dimensional conception of American identity influences these opinions. Our review suggests that the extant measures of American identity do not fully account for the various aspects of social identity theory. We capture more fully the different components of social identity theory. By doing so, we find that American identity has five dimensions. Therefore, in this analysis, we advance a more comprehensive measure of American identity. Analyzing data from the 2004–2005 National Politics Survey, we confirm that all five dimensions of American identity lead to opposition to legal immigration and a preference for spending increases to combat illegal immigration.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-8-2018
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7030041
Repository Citation
Mangum, Maurice and Block, Ray Jr., "Social Identity Theory and Public Opinion Towards Immigration" (2018). Political Science Faculty Publications. 2.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/polsci_facpub/2
Included in
American Studies Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social Psychology and Interaction Commons
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Social Sciences, v. 7, issue 3, 41, p. 1-16.
© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).