Where Is the Party in Social Construction Theory? Partisan Mappings of Politically Relevant Target Groups

The social construction theory of target populations has proven to be powerfully predictive, showing that policy makers are incentivized to do good things for “good people” but produce punitive policies for “deviants.” While establishing an important conceptual framework, the theory does not address the idea that various subgroups in society may evaluate policy targets differently. Here, we focus on the key issue of partisan identity, a lens through which American policy makers and citizens view the world. Our study is an extension of this original work, building a bridge between critical policy scholars and scholars of political attitudes and behavior. By relying on crowdsourcing, we (a) assess the extent to which consensus emerges around social constructions and (b) determine the role that partisan identity plays in producing vastly different worldviews around dozens of groups. We find that there are multiple mappings of the groups because several social constructions pivot on party lines.