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

Daniel S Lane, Melody Chen, & Yifei Wang 

Journal of Communication | 2026

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). We use data from 33,690 American respondents from three national surveys: one longitudinal (1972–2020) and two fielded in 2020.