Parties as Superordinate Categories and Their Functions in Sociopsychological Adaptation to Political Conflict

I develop a conceptual framework for studying parties as superordinate categories, arguing parties help partisans adapt to prolonged conflict with outgroups and manage intragroup competition among copartisans. Conceptualizing parties as superordinate categories better captures variation in party culture across time and parties through singular and dual recategorization, which emphasize partisan identity exclusively or allow partisans to retain more salient identities (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation) while partisan identity functions as a common front, respectively. I connect literature on the group-schematic approach to political cognition (i.e., race-party schemas) with literature on the self as a heuristic in group evaluations to explain how the self and race-party schemas become interconnected in memory networks to generate ingroup bias among coalition members. Lastly, I draw on sociopsychological literature on intractable conflicts to elaborate on how superordinate conceptualization better explains how parties help fulfill constituent needs in prolonged conflict through sociopsychological infrastructure. I end with a review of qualitative work on dominant groups in the right to demonstrate how parties help partisans adapt to prolonged conflict.