2025 Theses Doctoral

Essays on Identification, Classification, and Exclusion

Donahue, Samuel

This dissertation addresses one of the central problems in sociology--the construction of group boundaries and the collective identities that these boundaries delineate. I focus on two identities that recent research suggests have become increasingly unsettled—partisanship and ethnoracial identity.

Using individual-level administrative data, I examine three dimensions of boundary-making--identification, classification, and exclusion. In the first essay, I investigate when and under what conditions partisans attempt to cross ethnoracial boundaries. I document distinct and durable patterns of ethnoracial. I show that Republicans are significantly more likely than similarly situated Democrats to change from identifying as Hispanic to identifying as White non-Hispanic, while Democrats are more likely than Republicans to reidentify in the opposite direction.

In the second essay, I construct a linked dataset that includes both self-identified and observer-classified race for a large sample of individuals. Using these data I ask whether reidentification corresponds with reclassification. I find that transitions out of Whiteness are associated with a significant decline in classification as White, while transitions into Whiteness are not.

Finally, in the third essay, I consider identity and social exclusion, examining patterns of racial discrimination among partisans. Drawing on data from a Florida police department and the Florida Department of Elections, I show that White Republican officers are significantly more likely to search Black motorists than White Democratic officers.

In this dissertation, I argue that partisanship functions as a moral framework that shapes conceptions of legitimate membership and aspirational community within an imagined citizenry. Partisans, I contend, hold different racial schemas and assign symbolic value differently within these frameworks. These competing logics of race, racial integration, and group membership more broadly shape how partisans understand their own racial identities—or the set of identities they perceive as available to them—and the boundaries of out-groupness.