Cultural Polarization and Social Groups: The Case of Book Banning

Research on cultural polarization implicitly relies on two models: the spillover model, in which politics seeps into everyday life, and the consolidation model, in which everyday life is increasingly sorted into politics. These frameworks hold significant implications both for our understanding of cultural polarization, and our real-world strategies to address it. To help adjudicate between these two perspectives we examine a contemporary conservative social movement: book bans in public schools and libraries. Using vignette experiments that manipulate the social characteristics of the main characters in existing novels, our findings support the consolidation model of cultural polarization. Although Americans are inclined to judge the appropriateness of books based on the social identities of their main characters, they still generally consider stories about outgroups and rivals to be appropriate for public schools and libraries. Ideological effects are significantly attenuated by sociodemographic, psychometric, and sociometric factors that have been consolidated into parties. This suggests that even at the height of a “take-off” issue replete with consistent cueing by partisan elites and targeted campaigns by activists, popular culture remains a resource for polarized partisans, rather than a creator of them.