Group identities and their perceived representation in the party system: evidence from four European countries

The formation of a political cleavage requires a socio-structural, a normative, and an organizational element. Recent research on the emergence of a universalist-particularist cleavage in Western European party systems has emphasized the normative element by demonstrating the importance of social identities as a source of political preferences and electoral behavior: voters pick their parties not just based on programmatic concerns but also based on social identities. Yet, existing studies do not connect social identities to the supply side of the political system. In this paper, we focus on the organizational element of cleavage formation and emphasize the link between the demand and the supply side of the political system by studying how voters perceive the representation of different social identities by different parties. We argue that identity-vote-links are underpinned by systematic patterns in the perception of identity-party-links. We present results from an original survey conducted in France, Germany, Switzerland and the UK, in which we asked respondents about their perception of the link between a range of social identities and political parties. These results support the notion of an organizational dimension of cleavage formation in several ways. Firstly, we find that voters have a pretty accurate mental map of their countries’ party system. Secondly, their own social identities also affect their perception of the party system: voters generally associate their ingroups with parties that they like and their outgroups with parties that they don’t like. Therefore, knowing how individuals perceive identity-party-links helps predicting their own voting behavior. Thirdly, the perception of an ingroup-inparty link is more differentiated and less schematic than the perception of an outgroup-outparty link. Finally, voters in countries where there was an early political realignment along a universalism-particularism cleavage have more congealed and realigned perceptions of the link between certain identities and certain parties than voters in countries in which this cleavage was only politicized more recently.