The Meanings and Dimensions of Citizens’ Political Identity

Understanding citizens’ political identity is crucial to our knowledge and understanding of political behavior and as a source of conflict. The term, political identity, is often associated with citizens’ identities that come into play in situations which are perceived of some political salience by citizens. In the academic literature, political identities are referred to as very different from one another. Partisan identities have been found to be important, albeit weakening due to the decline of class identities and spread of ‘catch-all parties’. Nonetheless, partisan identities may at times be important. Other identities are usually defined by issues related to ethnicity, social class or geographical belonging. Furthermore local, regional, national and, particularly, global identities have become important in shaping citizens’ political identities. These identities have underscored that political identities are not stable, but fluid and continuously developing. Nevertheless, a variety of identities seem to play a crucial role in political behavior and the question in this paper is: in what way may we speak of a specific political identity? This paper revisits existing academic literature to reveal how political identities have been conceptualised and applied to empirical examples. Based on a summary of different conceptions of political identity, we discuss how we should conceptualize political identity and its various relevant dimensions and meanings today. Subsequently, we offer a selection of theoretical approaches, which we believe is fruitful in order to understand what political identity refers to and to respond to our research question.