Party Loyalty Beats Race and Religion in U.S. Views of Human Rights Abuse

🔎 Study Focus

Which actor identities and social or political cleavages shape public opinion on human rights violations? Building on social identity theory and moral typecasting theory, the research tests the relative impact of multiple identity characteristics on how Americans respond to alleged abuses.

🧪 A large U.S. conjoint experiment

• Conjoint survey experiment conducted with 3,200 U.S. respondents.
• Examines causal effects of in-group bias across multiple actor identities:
• perpetrator
• target
• elite cue giver
• Tests social and political divides including:
• partisanship
• race
• religion
• citizenship

📊 Key Finding

• Party loyalty to the perpetrator dominates other group identities.

⚖️ Why It Matters

• The dominance of partisan loyalty implies that party cues may strongly shape public evaluations of government abuses, with important implications for accountability, media framing, and human rights advocacy in a polarized context.