Identity Spillovers: How the Politics of Immigration Shapes Class and Religious Self-Identification

Social identities like class and religion are typically treated as stable antecedents of political preferences. This article shows that the causal arrow can also run in reverse: when exposed to narratives that pit immigrants against a discrete native social group, individuals can ‘update’ their identities to match their preferences over immigration. We theorise that anti-immigration individuals may claim membership of groups portrayed as threatened by immigrants as a form of instrumental belief justification: adopting this identity allows them to ground out-group aversion in concern for in-group interests. We test this framework with two original survey experiments: one on class identity in Britain and one on Christian identity in Italy. When primed with narratives framing immigration as a threat to the British working class or to the role of Christianity in Italian culture, respondents with anti-immigration preferences become more likely to claim working-class and Christian identities. In the British case, we also find evidence that pro-immigration individuals dis-identify from the working class when exposed to the treatment. These identity updates are driven by respondents who lack ‘objective’ markers of group membership (i.e., middle-class Britons and non-church-going Italians). They are also not reflected in changes in support for policies benefiting these groups, underscoring the instrumental nature of individuals' responses to these narratives. Overall, the findings speak to the literature on cleavage realignment, suggesting that when political actors strategically link immigration to ‘old’ dimensions of political conflict, traditional categories of politics such as class and religion acquire new meanings in people's minds.