A Party like Me: How Social Identities Drive Voters’ Party Preferences

• In Event: The Electoral Effects of Group Status and Identity

Abstract

Party group appeals and party-group linkages, denoting instances where a political party either positively or negatively targets or associates with specific social groups, are prevalent in parties' electoral strategies. These linkages encompass parties' public interactions with social groups depicted in the news media, formal representation of social groups in party organizations, descriptive representation of social groups, and rhetorical appeals to specific groups. However, existing theories of party competition and voting behavior have primarily centered on contestation over policy issues, whether in terms of positionality or salience. This absence, coupled with the recent identity shift in political behavior research (e.g., Achen and Bartels 2016), underscores a need to better understand the role that social identity plays in democratic processes such as representation. Political parties have long been recognized for their crucial role in connecting citizens to the political world and facilitating representative government. Nevertheless, there is limited knowledge about how parties engage with people's group identities and the consequences of these associations. This paper focuses on the effects of political parties' group linkages, contending that voters utilize information about these associations when forming partisan attachments and deciding which party to vote for. Specifically, individuals should prefer parties that associate with or appeal to social groups they are part of/identify with or like, compared to parties lacking such group linkages. To test this "identity congruence" theory, I employ a conjoint experiment with pairs of hypothetical political parties. This approach allows me to assess the determinants of voters' party preferences in a multi-dimensional choice setting, where parties often vary across characteristics, including policy positions, valence attributes, and group linkages. The results seek to contribute to our understanding of how political parties fulfill the critical democratic function of representation by elucidating the nature of party preference in contemporary politics, especially in multiparty contexts such as in Europe. Importantly, they shed light on how voters navigate trade-offs between policy considerations and group identity-related factors.

Author

• Timea Balogh, University of California, Davis