How "Us" and "Them" Relates to Voting Behavior--Social Structure, Social Identities, and Electoral Choice

How "Us" and "Them" Relates to Voting Behavior--Social Structure, Social Identities, and Electoral Choice (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997504) was written by Simon Bornschier, Silja Häusermann, Delia Zollinger, and Céline Colombo in 2021. It was published in Comparative Political Studies (vol. 54, no. 12).

The authors present a constructivist model of voting behavior.

Since the 1980s, there has been a political realignment in the Western world by a universalism-particularism cleavage. This cleavage is seen in opinions towards immigration and preferences for redistribution. There are durable 'class' (type of employment), educational, and rural-urban characteristics to the sides.

"The resulting divide has been variously labeled as opposing Green-alternative-left (GAL) and traditional-authoritarian-nationalist (TAN) positions (Hooghe et al., 2002), libertarian-universalistic and traditionalist-communitarian values (Bornschier, 2010), or as a divide exhibiting distinctive “grid” and “group” components (Kitschelt & Rehm, 2014). Finally, scholars emphasizing the struggle over borders prefer the terms “integration-demarcation” (Bartolini, 2005; Kriesi et al., 2008) or “cosmopolitanism-communitarianism” (de Wilde et al., 2019; Strijbis et al., 2020). Here, we use the terms “universalism versus particularism” (Beramendi et al., 2015)..."

The authors understand cleavages as being a product of social structures translated into politics by collective identities. The authors seek 'positive' identities that inform this cleavage. That is, they expect that 'losers of modernization' is too negative of an image for voters to self-identify that way.

In Switzerland, this realignment occurred in the 1980s.

• Greens emerged and SP realigned to absorb some of those voters, but also lost many traditional voters in the process

• SVP emerged

• traditional parties (Liberals and the Christian Democrats) in decline

Online survey

• Fielded by GfK in 2018
• Target audience is German speaking Swiss
• 1000 responses balanced by quotas on age, education, and gender
• Weighted by sex, age, education, and party preference
• Perceived closeness measures: "How close do you feel to the following groups? By “close” we mean, who is likely to resemble you with regard to their attitudes, circumstances, and sentiments?"
• Open ended question about "perceived in-groups and out-groups"
• Party preference measure: which party respondents feel closest to
  • Recoded as new left (Greens, SP, AL, Solidarités, PdA), far right (SVP, EDU, SD), and center (which is largely discarded) (CVP, FDP, GLP, BDP, EVP)
• Education is recoded as below secondary, secondary, and tertiary degree
• Occupation is recoded per ISCO-3d, but is onyl populated for about half the sample

Groups are formed by:

• education
  1. people with higher education
  2. people with vocational training
  3. people without a degree
• occupation
  4. wealthy people
  5. people from the middle class
  6. people with humble financial means
  7. people who work with and for other people
  8. people who produce a concrete product in their job
  9. people with a similar job as you have
• urban-rural
  10. people in the countryside
  11. urban people
• universalism-communitarianism
  12. Swiss people
  13. people with a migration background
  14. cosmopolitans
• Milieu theory
  15. culturally interested people
• gender
  16. men
  17. women

The authors study connections between objective social structures and subjective closeness. They use ordered logistic regression on structural socioeconomic factors. They use separate models predicting each group closeness measure. On one hand, this analysis validates the group closeness measures. Respondents with high education should perceive closeness to 'people with higher education'. It also identifies the most salient identities. People can have many identities, but the magnitudes of estimated coefficients should reflect the relative salience.

The authors use a similar analysis, regressing on preferred party, to understand relative salience of identities within party electorates.

The authors next examine the identities that have been politicized. A party preference should predict a group identity if it is politicized. Moreover, there should be a statistically significant difference between parties. They use regress on party preference to predict the group closeness measures.

The authors then use logistic regression on socioeconomic factors and in-group identifiers to predict party preferences. These in-group identifiers are created by taking the average group closeness score within each party's electorate, and overall. The party-specific deviations are then calculated. For each party, the three most positive deviations are the in-group indicators and the three most negative deviations are the out-group indicators.

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