An “Identity Turn” in political communication?: testing the relationship between media use and identity alignment in the United States

Daniel Lane, Melody Chen, & Yifei Wang

Journal of Communication | 2025
 

Despite a rise in identity-centric communication scholarship, there is a lack of theory and evidence regarding how media use relates to the on-going alignment between political and social identities (i.e., identity alignment). We offer a framework for theorizing this dynamic and apply it to examine the relationship between Americans’ media diets and on-going psychological alignment between political and social identities in the United States (i.e., partisan social sorting).