Shannon C. McGregor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Kevin Coe, University of Utah
https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/106548, PDF
Political communication as a practice is fundamentally about identity, in all its myriad forms. But political communication as a subfield of Communication and Political Science has not always adequately recognized this. We made this argument earlier this year in a piece we published in Communication Monographs. Working with a tremendous team of coauthors and respondents, that “Dialogue on Difference: Identity and Political Communication” feature helped illuminate the many ways that political communication research could benefit from centering identity (McGregor et al., 2025).
In the present essay, we briefly summarize – but, more importantly, extend – our arguments in that piece. Even though that article appeared in 2025, work on it began in 2020. Five years removed from our initial thinking, it seems clearer than ever that identity is a defining force in political communication (e.g., Coles & Lane, 2023; Hopkins et al., 2025; Kreiss et al., 2024; Knüpfer et al., 2024; Kuo & Marwick, 2021; Lane et al., 2022; Lane et al., 2025; Mourao & Brown, 2025; Reddi et al., 2023; Smith et al., 2025; Wells & Friedland, 2023; Young, 2023). It also feels more pressing than ever to underscore how centering identity in political communication research can produce scholarship better equipped to deal with heightened attacks on democratic values and social justice. Put simply, many of the political challenges roiling communities across the globe are tied to issues of identity; scholars need to recognize this and meet the urgency of the moment.
We briefly discuss some ways in which the field can – and increasingly has – centered identity. We then extend this thinking into suggestions for how centering identity prepares scholars to tackle questions at the heart of political communication in times that are dangerous – for democracy and for scholars.
Identity and the Study of Political Communication
Identity can be understood as “a core perception of oneself vis-à-vis others and others vis- à-vis oneself that manifests simultaneously as demographic categories and structural locations” (McGregor et al., 2025, p. 219). Identity is dynamic, relational, and intersectional (Chávez, 2012; Cho et al., 2013) – complexities that add valuable nuance to its contours and also make it somewhat more difficult to study than some other objects of analysis.
To better understand how digging deeper into the nuances of identity can benefit political communication research, consider three domains that have long been major areas of study in this subfield: elite communication, journalistic norms/routines, and engagement.
Elite Communication
Studying the content, circulation, and effects of elite messages has been a staple of political communication research for as long as the subfield has existed. In some obvious ways, however, focusing too much on the communication of political leaders at the expense of other communicators narrows the range of identities researchers might study (e.g., focusing more on men than women and other gender identities, focusing more on wealthier individuals). And even as those in power come to represent a broader range of identities, research on elite communication has too often emphasized WEIRD (i.e., Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) countries (Rossini, 2023) and reproduced a “great orators” logic (Murphy & Lechuga, 2021).
Centering identity in the study of elite communication can take several productive forms. For example, scholars can focus on aspects of identity not yet familiar in most studies of elite communication (e.g., Smith, 2018) and/or highlight underrepresented groups relatively new to political power (e.g., Aswad & de Velasco, 2020). Another useful approach is to apply new lenses to elite voices that have long been included, thereby highlighting the key roles that identity plays in such familiar discourses (e.g., Griffin, 2019).
Journalistic Norms/Routines
Journalistic norms/routines is another familiar area of political communication scholarship where centering identity can be helpful. Scholarly work in this area documents how news production both reflects and reinforces broader systems of power – and yet political communication scholarship has insufficiently engaged with identity as a structuring force in these processes. Journalists’ identities – particularly gender, race, and ethnicity – shape access to sources, story selection, and story assignment (Heckman, 2023; Sui & Paul 2020). Research on campaign coverage demonstrates how gendered and racialized stereotypes influence press coverage of candidates (Meeks, 2012; McIlwain & Caliendo, 2014), though such scholarship often understates the institutional and structural roots of these disparities.
Scholarship on protest coverage provides a compelling case of how centering identity can shift both empirical findings and theoretical approaches. Whereas earlier work emphasized informational deficits, such as an overemphasis on protest tactics, recent identity-centered research rooted in critical perspectives demonstrates how protest coverage reproduces hierarchies of social struggle and criminalizes Black victims and protestors (Brown & Harlow, 2019; Mourao et al., 2021). These studies foreground identity and power, usefully deepening how we think about journalistic norms and routines. Despite these advances, identity-centered research remains sparse within political communication journals and tends to focus narrowly on race or gender. Substantial work remains to be done to more comprehensively integrate identity into the study of journalistic norms and routines.
Engagement
A third area of political communication research worth considering vis-a-vis identity is engagement. Identity fundamentally shapes both how people consume political information and, in turn, how they participate in the political sphere. For example, political, gender, and geographic identities influence media preferences, partisan activism, and the very opportunities individuals have for engagement (e.g., Freelon et al., 2020; Van Duyn, 2022). As politics has become more personalized, identity has only grown more central – structuring news repertoires, search practices, and the curated flows through which people encounter political content (Tripodi, 2022; Thorson & Wells, 2016). These approaches collectively demonstrate that engagement emerges from the interplay of multiple identity dimensions embedded in complex information environments.
Yet engagement research often sidelines questions of identity and power, revealing the costs of treating participation as inherently virtuous or identity-neutral. When work does center identity, a wider array of political participation becomes visible, including hidden or enclave forms of participation and networked counterpublic organizing (e.g., Clark 2025; Jackson et al., 2020). Moving beyond simply “controlling” for identity means producing scholarship that examines heterogeneous effects in the relationships between identity appeals and social movements and identity-based engagement with them – all of which can help expand our theoretical understandings of political action and resistance.
Meeting the Moment: Studying Identity in Dangerous Times
It is beyond the scope of this brief essay to recount the many considerable, growing dangers facing communities across the globe. Suffice it to say, democratic values are under attack in a host of places around the world, and these attacks are often grounded in issues of identity (Carrier & Carothers, 2025). Though global lessons about partial recovery from democratic backsliding point to a limited role for an academic subfield or individual scholars (Riedl et al., 2025), the stronger the academic community can stand – or even push – against democratic backsliding, the stronger a foundation upon which to recover.
How should political communication scholars proceed? We consider three complementary strategies stemming from the intersections of identity and political communication.
Identify Identity Overtly
Much of what scholars of political communication study is directly or indirectly about identity. But, too often, we do not categorize it as such – or at least do not do so with enough precision. Consider the issue of polarization, which researchers have studied extensively over the past several decades (e.g., Kubin & Von Sikorski, 2021). Polarization suggests that two political groups (e.g., liberals and conservatives) have moved apart ideologically. But if we talk about polarization only in those terms, we miss the starker reality that ideological extremism, often driven by xenophobia and racism, has been responsible for much of this movement. Being specific about the identity considerations at play in a given domain of research is crucial.
Identifying identity overtly also means taking seriously the fact that different identity groups have different relationships to political power – and these dynamics are crucial to correctly characterizing the implications of research findings. Staying with the polarization example, political communication researchers often bemoan the growth of polarization. This can mask the fact that, in some cases, what less polarization indicated was not harmony but rather the domination of one identity group by another. For example, in the U.S. context, “much of the broader polarization literature is framed against a supposedly normatively desirable time of less polarization—one that coincided with the existence of White racial authoritarian states in the U.S. South” (Kreiss & McGregor, 2023, p. 566). Identifying identity overtly allows for a more accurate accounting of the evidence while helping to ensure that crucial power dynamics are not left unexplored.
Adopt a Pro-Democracy Stance
Academic observers are increasingly realizing a crucial truth: The scholarly impulse toward dispassion and neutrality eases the path toward democratic backsliding. As Knüpfer et al. (2024) put it, “If the far right aims to undermine academic values and practices, then we must take a clear stance on what we are defending in our political communication scholarship.” What we are defending, most fundamentally, is pluralistic democracy (see Scacco & Coe, 2021). That system of government includes, crucially, the right of scholars to conduct research that might be critical of those in power.
Most studies of political communication have clear implications for pluralistic democracy; scholars are usually comfortable identifying those implications, at least in general terms. What they are less comfortable doing – yet what is now necessary – is identifying in concrete terms how our research findings might suggest danger for democracy and which political forces are creating that danger. In other words, we must be willing to point out democratic harm and say who is causing it.
This leads to two key points. First, the above strategy of identifying identity overtly comes into play again. It is not enough to blandly state that democratic norms have been degraded. We must instead say who is attacking those norms. Note how the Knüpfer et al. (2024) example above does exactly that, clearly calling out the far right. Studies of narrower contexts can and should be even more specific – identifying which political party, for example, is attacking democratic values (see also Griffin, 2019; Kreiss & McGregor, 2023).
Second, when political communication researchers adopt a pro-democracy stance, they both specify their findings more clearly and offer a needed reminder that the academy has an important role to play in the defense of pluralistic democracy. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have sought to constrain academic freedom (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2019) and scholars today are facing alarming attacks (Scholars at Risk, 2024). Those who seek truth wherever it leads are often at odds with authoritarians, and scholars should not shy from that challenge – though it would no doubt be helpful if their institutions supported them in those efforts.[1]
Use Language that Underscores the Stakes
Scholars studying political communication sometimes fall into the trap of being too cautious with their language. In fact, we almost fell into that very trap. When labeling the section of which this subsection is one part, we initially used the phrase “difficult times.” And that is true: these are difficult times. But it is more precise, and more productive, to call these “dangerous times” – because those are the stakes. Pluralistic democracy is in danger, as are many who seek to defend it. This includes, as has too often been the case, a disproportionate percentage of people who occupy minoritized identities, such as women, people of color, trans people and others in the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, and many others.
Not unlike journalists who, out of habit, give equal treatment to “both sides” even when the facts do not warrant that treatment, political communication scholars sometimes shy from terms that embed within them a judgment (e.g., autocrat, extremist, racist). It is these terms, though, that correctly underscore the stakes.
It is important to note that one needn’t seek conceptual clarity on their own. There is scholarly work with well-sourced definitions of terms like authoritarianism, racism, misogyny, hate-speech – and if our findings point to one of those things, we ought to say so (with citation, of course). This applies to a wide array of foundational political concepts. For example, if we are to describe a country as a democracy, in what areas are they succeeding – and where are they struggling? Sources like the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project provide well-documented and granular markers of democracy for a host of countries (Coppedge et al., 2025). And sources such as Cline Center for Advanced Social Research can build databases that allow the January 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol to not just be called a protest or a riot but an “attempted auto-coup” and “attempted dissident coup” (Cline Center, 2022).
Conclusion
In her book, The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies, Susan Stokes (2025) introduces the concept of “trash-talking democracy,” wherein leaders attempt to retain public support while simultaneously transgressing democratic rules. Key to this strategy is that the leaders also stoke polarization, with identity appeals playing a significant role.
As political communication scholars, centering identity means examining the claims leaders make that might contribute to this kind of “trash-talking democracy.” It means being clear about the content, platforms, and systems of power that do – and do not – “work” for certain identity groups. And, yes, it might well mean shining a light on wannabe autocrats who weaponize identity appeals to stoke division and enhance their own power. That is what the success of pluralistic democracy demands, and it will be up to all of us to meet that challenge.
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Authors
Shannon C. McGregor (PhD, University of Texas – Austin) is an associate professor and a principal investigator at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) – both at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research examines how media and technology shape social and democratic processes: communication, journalism, public opinion, and epistemologies of public life in democracies. McGregor’s interdisciplinary and mixed-method research has been published across fields including top journals in communication, political science, and sociology. She is co-editor of Media and January 6th (Oxford, 2024).
Kevin Coe is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, where he also directs the Edna Anderson-Taylor Communication Institute. He is the coauthor of two books, The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times (Oxford, 2021, with Joshua Scacco) and The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (Oxford, 2010, with David Domke), as well as numerous research articles. He is a past chair of the American Political Science Association’s Political Communication Section and the National Communication Association’s Political Communication Division.
[1] See, for example, https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-university-college.html and https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/20/inside-the-trump-administrations-assault-on-higher-education