Building State Communities: Identity and Federated Resource Sharing

In this paper, we argue that American federalism structures the impact and development of civic culture by emphasizing layered political identities that, in turn, shape Americans’ sense of community. While much of the scholarly focus has been on national or regional identity (e.g. Huddy and Khatib 2007, Theiss-Morse 2009, Cooper and Knotts 2017), we focus on Americans’ attachment to their state of residence. Using data from a 50-state survey as well as online survey experiments in which participants play three different adapted dictator’s games, we show that individuals with a greater sense of state identity were also more generous towards their fellow state residents, whether in the sharing of tangible financial resources or their understanding of how the collective had reacted to the pandemic. The continued salience of state identity—and its impact on political behavior—has important implications for the sustenance of federalism in America.