Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Political Science and Social Identity

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Democratic government can only be held accountable if citizens acquire sufficient knowledge about politics and policies. In many cases, politicians are the most important sources of this information, and one of the well-observed features of current politics is that this information is often couched in the rhetoric of social identities. The appeals to social identities resonate with voters because voters may lack other sources of political information and because shared group membership guides voters on which information to use and which source of information might be reliable as they make their decisions. Yet because public officials typically know more about the content and consequences of policies than voters do, there might be a concern that appeals to social identities might bring voters to support policies that have unfavorable impacts on them. This project focuses on the potential tradeoff between the benefits and costs of social identity appeals. Although social identity claims in politics are commonplace, we know little about the mechanisms by which social identification influences political behavior and we thus know little as well about what to expect from this tradeoff. This project seeks to advance our knowledge by addressing two related questions: when politicians should be expected to be more or less successful in using identity claims to increase support for their positions and when the electoral discourse may come to be dominated by identity claims. By developing a new theoretical model of identity discourse and implementing a series of laboratory experiments based on it, the researchers seek to pinpoint determinants of individual decision-making rooted in otherwise unobservable features of human behavior such as social identity, level of knowledge, and beliefs about the world. The project draws on and contributes to the related disciplines of political science, economics, and social psychology. More broadly, it enriches understanding of citizen decision making in the electoral process. Given the central role that free and fair elections play in any democracy, the project sheds light as well the workings of democracy overall.