‘Down-To-Earth Citizens’ or ‘Socially-Minded Cosmopolitans’? – How Voters’ Self-Described Group Identities Relate to Party Preferences

Political polarization between the new left and the far right in the last decades has triggered renewed interest in the politics of identity. Across advanced democracies, the group basis of more affective forms of polarization has become increasingly apparent. This paper uses quantitative text analysis to investigate how voters in Switzerland describe their in-groups and out-groups in response to open-ended questions in an original online survey. Building on insights from both political sociology and social psychology, I focus on group identities underpinning a ‘second’, universalist-particularist dimension of politics (where new left and far right parties occupy the poles). I use a semi-supervised document scaling method – latent semantic scaling – to identify terms associated with the poles of the universalism-particularism divide in voters’ own descriptions of their identities. This scaling model, combined with a dictionary approach, serves to measure universalist versus particularist identity in individuals’ responses. The resulting identity measures contribute substantially to explaining preferences for new left versus far right parties, and they appear rooted in known socio-structural underpinnings of second dimension oppositions (notably education). These results and the specific identity descriptions offered by voters support the idea that the universalist-particularist divide is emerging as a fully-fledged electoral ‘cleavage’, comprised not only of socio-structural and political elements but also of distinctive collective identities linking the two. Further, the types of answers given by voters – reflecting in-group bias, out-group hostility, frequently passing moral judgement, or characterizing groups in terms of personality traits – point towards important links between deepening affective polarization and emerging cleavage identities (which are linked to but distinct from partisan identities).