Pablo J. Boczkowski

“For over sixty years, political scientists and political communication scholars have consistently found that citizens know and often care little about politics. Citizens have little in the way of developed ideological frameworks for understanding politics or consistent policy preferences. They vote based on their social identities, or how they perceive themselves and others, their partisan identities, and their sense of the groups they believe the two political parties represent. Politics, then, is primarily an identity-based phenomenon. One way of thinking about it is akin to sports fandom, albeit with much higher stakes - citizens want their partisan and social group teams to be the "winners" and other teams to be the "losers". The political ideologies or policies at stake are largely unimportant for most Americans compared with the success of the teams they affiliate with.”
― Pablo J. Boczkowski