How party competition shapes voters’ group identities and electoral preferences

It is increasingly recognized that social identities are an important source of political preferences and electoral behavior. However, it is less clear how exogenous the importance of different identities is to the political debate. Can political competition “activate” structural social identities by making them salient? Or is there an even stronger element of agency, in which party competition affects what people perceive as their most salient identities? In this paper, we study the results of a survey experiment conducted in Germany and France, in which we prime respondents to think about different axes of party competition. In one treatment group, we tell respondents that party competition mainly revolves around “cultural” questions of universalism or particularism. In a second treatment, we tell them that economic questions of redistribution and a free market are the focus of party competition. Afterwards, we ask respondents to indicate their closeness towards different social groups as well as their political preferences on several issues and their prospective vote choice. We test whether these treatments increase the salience of certain social identities (related to class, education, residence and the like) and whether this increased salience translates into party choice. We expect French voters to have more congealed perceptions of the link between certain identities and certain parties due to the long-standing importance of a universalism-particularism cleavage. We expect the treatment to have stronger effects in Germany, on the other hand, where the more recent politicization of this cleavage means that the links between these identities and parties are more malleable. As a consequence, there should be more room for an effect of discourse and mobilization.