How “Us” and “Them” Relates to Voting Behavior—Social Structure, Social Identities, and Electoral Choice

• Author: Simon Bornschier,Silja Häusermann,Delia Zollinger,Céline Colombo
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997504
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 54(12) 2087 –2122

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997504

Comparative Political Studies

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997504

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Article

How “Us” and “Them”

Relates to Voting

Behavior—Social

Structure, Social

Identities, and

Electoral Choice

Simon Bornschier1, Silja Häusermann1,

Delia Zollinger1, and Céline Colombo*

Abstract

The last decades have seen the emergence of a divide pitting the new left

against the far right in advanced democracies. We study how this universalism-

particularism divide is crystallizing into a full-blown cleavage, complete with

structural, political and identity elements. So far, little research exists on the

identities that voters themselves perceive as relevant for drawing in- and

out-group boundaries along this divide. Based on an original survey from

Switzerland, a paradigmatic case of electoral realignment, we show that

voters’ “objective” socio-demographic characteristics relate to distinctive,

primarily culturally connoted identities. We then inquire into the degree

to which these group identities have been politicized, that is, whether they

divide new left and far right voters. Our results strongly suggest that the

universalism-particularism “cleavage” not only bundles issues, but shapes

how people think about who they are and where they stand in a group

conflict that meshes economics and culture.

1University of Zurich, Switzerland

*Delia Zollinger, Silja Häusermann and Simon Bornschier are listed in alphabetical order,

which reflects equal contribution to the article. Céline Colombo co-authored the initial draft

of the paper and participated in the collection of data.

Corresponding Author:

Delia Zollinger, University of Zurich, Affolternstrasse 56, Zurich 8050, Switzerland.

Email: delia.zollinger@ipz.uzh.ch

997504CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021997504Comparative Political StudiesBornschier et al.

research-article2021

2088 Comparative Political Studies 54(12)

2 Comparative Political Studies 00(0)

Keywords

elections, public opinion, and voting behavior, identity, cleavages, European

politics

Introduction

Major disruptive shifts in electoral politics across advanced democracies—

the rise of right-wing populism and the fragmentation of the mainstream

left and right in many European countries—continue to intrigue political

scientists: debates over whether the drivers of these changes are economic

or cultural are by now giving way to discussions of how the two might

interact (e.g., Cramer, 2016; Gidron & Hall, 2017; Kurer, 2020). In this

paper, we show that integrating social identities into the study of electoral

politics offers a comprehensive framework for studying the interplay of

“economic” and “cultural” drivers of electoral behavior, and specifically of

realignment with far right and new left parties. While socio-structural cir-

cumstances are relevant, their link to electoral behavior is less straightfor-

ward than narrow political economy models would have us think. Rather,

individuals subjectively interpret their objective life conditions, and the

ensuing group boundaries mesh economic and cultural elements.

Furthermore, these interpretations need to be politicized to matter elector-

ally. Hence, we need to know how voters belonging to particular socio-

structural groups depict group boundaries between “them” and “us,” which

in turn underlie the divide between the new left and the far right. Here, we

study how objective socio-structural categories and subjective group iden-

tifications relate to each other and to electoral choice.

There is abundant evidence that objective social structural location contin-

ues to matter for electoral preferences even after the decline of class conflict,

supporting the theory of electoral realignment rooted in an evolving social

structure. Parties of the new left and the far right are located at opposing poles

of a new divide that crystallized in the 1980s and 1990s throughout Western

Europe (Bornschier, 2010; Hooghe & Marks, 2018; Rovny & Polk, 2019)—

labeled here universalism-particularism divide. These terms acknowledge

that this divide, while initially centering heavily on issues such as cultural

liberalism and immigration, has also come to incorporate distributive prefer-

ences (Häusermann & Kriesi, 2015). This emerging divide is linked both to

subjective perceptions of deprivation and status loss (Burgoon et al., 2019;

Elchardus & Spruyt, 2012; Gidron & Hall, 2017, 2020; Kurer, 2020), as well

as to objective socioeconomic positions. Regarding the latter, political soci-

ologists have amply shown that the voters of new left and far right parties are

characterized by specific socio-structural attributes. In particular, support for

Bornschier et al. 2089

Bornschier et al. 3

far right parties is concentrated within the manual working class and among

those with intermediate levels of education. “New left” parties, on the other

hand, are disproportionately supported by socio-cultural specialists, that is,

qualified employees working in client-interactive settings (Gingrich &

Häusermann, 2015; Häusermann & Kriesi, 2015; Oesch, 2013; Oesch &

Rennwald, 2018). The urban-rural divide is also crucial for understanding

support for far right versus new left actors and positions (Iversen & Soskice,

2019; Maxwell, 2019). These clear structural foundations of electoral align-

ment led many studies to infer voters’ electoral motives directly from their

material life conditions in increasingly knowledge-based societies (see

Iversen & Soskice, 2019; Manow, 2018 for two recent examples).

With the data typically drawn from large-scale surveys, however, we can

only identify the socio-demographic profile of new left and far right elector-

ates, as well as their attitudes, but we are unable to grasp subjective politi-

cized group identities that underlie and stabilize electoral realignment. These

identities are crucial, because they ultimately inform the programmatic

demands these electorates have and the appeals they are likely to respond to

(Huddy, 2001; Stubager, 2009). There is ample reason to think that voters’

self-identification does not simply mirror their ascriptive characteristics. The

literature commonly characterizes voters of the far right as “losers” of mod-

ernization” (Betz, 1994), “low/medium educated” (Stubager, 2010), “(rela-

tively) deprived” (Burgoon et al., 2019; Gidron & Hall, 2017; Gidron & Mijs,

2019; Kurer, 2020), “structurally threatened” (Mutz, 2018), or experiencing

“declinism” (Elchardus & Spruyt, 2016). Political psychology would have us

expect, however, that individuals construct their identities in more positive

terms. Hence, our ascriptive categories may not grasp the social identities

these respondents would name as relevant.

In this article, we therefore study voters’ own subjective perceptions of

the social and political world surrounding them, and—in a second step—

explore the politicization of these perceptions and how they contribute to

predicting vote choice. To integrate social identity research into our study

of partisan divides, we combine insights from social cleavage theory—

which understands salient socio-political divides as being rooted in social

structure, but translated into politics via collective identities—with applica-

tions of social identity theory in political settings (Helbling & Jungkunz,

2020; Huddy, 2001; Mason, 2018), and recent ethnographic studies

(Cramer, 2016; Hochschild, 2016), which focus more on individual percep-

tions of social group belonging. We ask three main questions. First, how do

key socio-structural variables (education, class and rural/urban residence)

relate to social identities? Second, how do voters of new left and far right

parties differ with regard to the social identities that are salient to them?