STATE IDENTITY AS A SOCIAL IDENTITY AND ITS DETERMINANTS

Building off existing research showing that individual identities are extremely relevant for understanding individuals’ political behavior and opinion, I argue that there are more place-based social identities in the United States besides national, urban, or rural identities. I propose that state identity is an additional social identity people possess. I define state identity as individuals’ feelings of closeness to a state, an evaluation of what being a part of the state means, and emotions based on one’s feelings of closeness and evaluation. Using an original nationally representative survey, I develop a measure of state identity and find evidence that state identity may be an additional form of social identity. Additionally, I explore how state identity possession may vary across a wide range of groups to see if certain groups possess state identity differently from one another.<p></p>