What’s in a State Flag?

What do Pennsylvania, Illinois, Nebraska, Mississippi, Michigan, Utah, Minnesota, Maine, South Carolina, and Massachusetts — states that span U.S. regions, and the political divide — have in common?

All 10 have seen recent attempts to redesign their state flags.

In Mississippi, public pressure led the state to abandon its Confederate-themed flag. In Massachusetts, a commission recommended that the state develop a new seal and flag that are more “aspirational and inclusive of the diverse perspectives, histories, and experiences” of its residents. Minnesota’s flag, once described as a “cluttered genocidal mess,” featured the state seal — a white farmer working in a field with a Native American on a horse in the background — surrounded by trees, a stream, stars, circles, meaningful dates, and more. The new blue and white flag is far simpler. It has a dark blue section in the shape of the state next to a light blue section representing the state’s many lakes; in the center is a white star.

Some flag redesign efforts have succeeded (Minnesota, Mississippi), some have not (Maine, Massachusetts), and others are ongoing. In states that adopted new flags, like Utah, some citizens and lawmakers have started campaigns to bring the old flags back. Citizens in additional states, like Washington, are pushing their lawmakers to join in the flag redesign game, too.

You might think state identities, and especially state flags, are not something Americans think about very often. But studying state identities has taught me that it does not take much to get people animated about them. A mere mention of my work or of flags that are SOBs (“seals on bedsheets”) or of the curious fact that some people get tattoos of the shape of their state leads to an outpouring of anecdotes, questions, and confessions. As one social media account that promotes the new Utah flag once posted, “Nobody cares about flags. Until they do. Everybody cares about flags.”

There is something about states that tugs at people. Their potential to shape what we see in ourselves and what we see in each other, and to establish community, is a power that we are only beginning to understand. As I’ve learned from new research on state identities, people’s psychological attachments to their states can promote unity, trust, and civic engagement. And the fact that so many states are in the process of reevaluating their identities is no coincidence.

A confluence of developments has made state politics and history, and their representation on things like flags — which are both inward reflections and outward projections of civic identity — particularly salient today. One is the increasing nationalization of politics: the growing alignment in how people vote across federal, state, and local offices, along with a greater focus on national politics in local news. Increasingly, citizens are discussing hot-button national issues — immigration, gun control, abortion, voting rights, and more — in state and local spaces. The rise of political polarization in Congress has led to repeated instances of gridlock on those same issues, enhancing states’ roles as sites of vibrant policymaking. Meanwhile, rapidly changing demographics, along with George Floyd’s 2020 murder by police in Minneapolis and the nationwide mass mobilization for racial justice that followed, have brought new perspectives to established imagery.

When I started researching the psychological connections people have to the states where they live, I quickly learned that many people say that being from their state is an important part of how they see themselves: in a 2023 survey I conducted, 58% of respondents said that their state was very or somewhat important to their identity. That’s similar to the importance people placed on other politically relevant identities, such as partisanship, race, economic class, and religion. I also found that state identities are not apolitical and are not just about fun stuff like nature, food, music, and sports. People are more likely to say that their state is an important part of their identity if they align with the state’s partisan bent. And although political considerations don’t emerge all that strongly when people are asked to explain why they feel connected to their state, they emerge quite forcefully when people discuss what they wish were different there — their comments range from political leadership and lower taxes to wanting more people who share their political ideology and policies that lower cost of living.

We still have a lot to learn about whether there are any political consequences related to the strength of people’s state identities. But scholars have found that strong state identities improve trust in government and increase people’s willingness to share limited resources with fellow state residents over others; this discrepancy is higher among people with strong state identities. Having a strong state identity also improves evaluations of one’s governor, particularly among people who don’t share their governor’s political party. People with high levels of state pride are more likely to support spending on health care, education, infrastructure, and transportation. And I have found that people with strong state identities are more likely to engage in local civic and political acts such as volunteering, attending a government meeting, and contacting elected officials.

One important question to consider in future research on state identities is whether they can deliver the good things that come from ingroup attachments without so many of the bad things. State identities don’t seem to be born out of resentment toward a clear outgroup, which means they might be less likely to fuel political conflicts than other group identities, such as race, partisanship, and the urban/rural divide.

The most salient outgroup for the state ingroup may be the national government, but it is not clear at all that this particular ingroup/outgroup dynamic is uniformly adversarial. As legal scholar Jessica Bulman-Pozen explains, finding connection with a state can serve as a proxy for national identity in a time when people feel that the government is deviating from their aspirational hopes for the country. A Washington Post columnist displayed this sentiment after the 2024 election in an op-ed titled, “My Blue State Is My Country Now,” expressing her pride in New York’s ability to stand for the values, rights, and opportunities she feels all Americans deserve. In other ingroup/outgroup dynamics, people generally belong to only one of the groups in question, not both; here, belonging to both groups allowed the author room to express aspirations for her state and her country simultaneously instead of pitting them against each other.

Is it possible that a connection to one’s state can help overcome more fraught divisions without accentuating outgroup animosity? Could American federalism, which is so often associated with fragmentation and divergence, be a force that helps keep people together in turbulent times? As one state senator in Utah put it when he was asked if he didn’t have anything better to do than get the state a new flag, “When you connect the values [we hold] with the symbols on the flag, we’re going to have a rallying point for the entire state. I’m really looking forward to taking the identity of what it means to be from Utah to the next level of something we can all unite behind.”

Deborah J. Schildkraut is the John Richard Skuse, Class of 1941, Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. 

Originally published on Zócalo Public Square. Primary Editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary Editor: Sarah Rothbard