Jason S. Tosta

Manuel Almagro’s criticisms of two-dimensional views of affective polarization motivate his theorization of partisan identities in his multi-dimension view. Particularly, he rejects individualist accounts of political identities in favor of an identity constructivist view in which narratives play a key role in shaping these identities. While Almagro does not explicitly provide the details of his constructivist view, this paper brings together scholarship on social construction with Almagro’s work to theorize the narrative construction of political identities. I explain how political identities are constitutively constructed by partisans using certain narratives, and how identities are discursively constructed within narrated world-views. Then, I use the socially constructed nature of political identities to raise a challenge to the diagnosis that partisans use narratives to express their identities. While the expressivist diagnosis is correct to show how partisans use narratives to express their attachments and other attitudes, I suggest it is mistaken to take political identities to be expressible, as attitudes are, given the non-internalized and socially constructed aspects of political identities. Instead, I offer an invocational model of identity participation that shows how partisans use narratives and express attitudes as ways of invoking political identities.