Parties as Superordinate Categories and Their Functions in Sociopsychological Adaptation to Political Conflict

I develop a conceptual framework for studying parties as superordinate categories, arguing parties help partisans adapt to prolonged conflict with outgroups and manage intragroup competition among co-identifiers through narratives. Conceptualizing parties as superordinate categories better captures variation in party culture across time and parties through singular and dual recategorization, which emphasize partisan identity exclusively or allow identifiers to retain more salient identities (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation) while partisan identity functions as a common front, respectively. I maintain hierarchy orientation shapes the psychological structure of partisanship and functions as common ground from which coherent narratives emerge. I connect literature on the group-schematic approach to political cognition (i.e., race-party schemas) with literature on the self as a heuristic in group evaluations to explain how the self and race-party schemas become interconnected in memory networks to generate ingroup bias among co-identifiers and contribute to social polarization. I draw on sociopsychological literature on intractable conflicts to elaborate how parties help fulfill identifier needs in prolonged conflict through sociopsychological infrastructure, and end with a review of literature on narratives on the political left and right to demonstrate how parties manage divergent coalition interests to help identifiers adapt to prolonged conflict.