Electoral competition in the presence of identity politics
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Author | Leyla D. Karakas,Devashish Mitra |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629820984847 |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2021, Vol.33(2) 169–197
ÓThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629820984847
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Electoral competition in the
presence of identity politics
Leyla D. Karakas
Department of Economics, MaxwellSchool of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse
University,Syracuse, NY, USA.
Devashish Mitra
Department of Economics, MaxwellSchool of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse
University,Syracuse, NY, USA.
Abstract
This paper studies the effects of cultural identity on electoral and policy outcomes when voters
are ‘‘behavioral.’’ Building on the evidence that voters assess political oreconomic events through
the lens of their partisan identifications, we analyze an election between two office-motivated
candidates in which voters over-reward or under-punish the candidate that shares their cultural
identity. Focusing on issues with cultural as well as distributional implications for voters such as
immigration and the cultural divide based on nativism as the source of identity politics, we find
that the candidates’ equilibrium policies are always preferred by the electorally dominant cultural
group to the policy that would be optimal if policies only had distributional consequences. We
also show that candidates do not necessarily target their own cultural bases in equilibrium.
Furthermore, stronger identity politics increases policy polarization. Our findings contribute to
the debates on the decoupling of voting behavior from economic interests, and the rise of immi-
gration, trade protectionism, or engagement with global governing institutions as electoral issues
that can shift historical voting patterns.
Keywords
Identity politics; partisanship;immigration; protectionism; nativism; Downsian competition
Corresponding author:
Leyla D.Karakas Department of Economics, Maxwell School of Citizenshipand Public Affairs, 110 Eggers Hall,
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA.
Email: lkarakas@maxwell.syr.edu
1. Introduction
Partisanship and identity politics are playing increasingly important roles across the
politics of Western democracies.
1
Moreover, cultural identity and values are increas-
ingly replacing more traditional lines of division such as income as the bases on
which partisanship and identity politics are defined. For instance, in a recent survey
of political values among American voters, the Pew Research Center (2017) found
record gaps between Democrats and Republicans in their attitudes toward the role of
government in helping the poor, immigration, or the value of diplomacy in conduct-
ing foreign affairs, while demographic gaps have remained more or less constant.
Evidence suggests that voters assess political and economic events through the
lens of their partisan identities.
2
In this paper, we study the effects of cultural iden-
tity politics on electoral and policy outcomes when voters judge candidates’ policy
platforms subjectively. We demonstrate how candidates can take advantage of the
cultural divisions in the electorate through strategic policy choices. As a theoretical
contribution, we introduce such ‘‘behavioral’’ voters to an otherwise-standard
Downsian model to generate equilibrium policy divergence and novel results on
voter targeting.
In their seminal book, Campbell et al. (1960) state that ‘‘identification with a party
raises a perpetual screen through which the individual tends to see what is favorable
to his partisan orientation. The stronger the party bond, the more exaggerated the
process of selection and perceptual distortion will be.’’ Experimental evidence such as
in Chen and Li (2009) supports this view, indicating that individuals are more likely
to reward and less likely to punish another individual they share a group identity
with. However, even though growing identity politics is a widely documented phe-
nomenon, the policy implications of voters’ identity-based assessments of candidates
have received scant attention within a theoretical setting. Given the evolving nature
of partisanship toward identity politics and its influence on voting behavior as sum-
marized in Figure 1, this constitutes our focus in this paper.
We consider issues with cultural as well as distributional consequences in order
to illustrate the role cultural identity plays in voting behavior and policy-making.
Examples of such issues include immigration, trade protectionism, foreign aid,
acceptance of refugees, or engagement with supranational institutions such as the
United Nations. These issues increasingly define partisanship, as evidenced by, for
instance, a Pew Research Center survey that had reported in 1994 that 30%of
Republicans and 32% of Democrats expressed pro-immigration views while more
recently finding that 84% of Democrats and only 42% of Republicans now think
immigrants strengthen the country.
3
A similar partisan gap exists on the question
of whether steel and aluminum tariffs are good for the US, with 58%of
Figure 1. Identity politics and voting behavior.
170 Journal of Theoretical Politics 33(2)
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