A party for "someone like me" - a theory of party competition and dynamic group identities

This project investigates how political parties in European democracies leverage group identities to boost their electoral support. We introduce a novel framework of dynamic identity appeals, which we apply to party competition about the working class vote. Drawing on recent theoretical contributions and original cross-national descriptive data, we argue that voters perceive linkages between parties and groups. Most voters, for example, see social-democratic or radical right parties, and at times both, as "the party of the working class". We propose that when political actors make working class identities salient, this linkage gets activated, prompting voters who identify as working class to feel a stronger connection with the party they associate with their group. This, in turn, increases their likelihood of voting for that party. A similar dynamic, we suggest, occurs among voters who do not identify as working class but sympathise with the group: when parties highlight the group-party linkage, these voters become more inclined to support the party associated with workers. Finally, we contend that this identity-based linkage between voters and parties operates independently of policy preferences. We provide empirical support for this theory using original data from a two-wave survey experiment conducted in the United Kingdom. Our contribution is twofold: first, we introduce and test a new theory of party competition in European multiparty systems; second, we theorise the existence of party–voter linkages that go beyond programmatic and clientelistic models.

Meet our speaker

Tarik Abou-Chadi is Professor in European Union and Comparative European Politics at the Department of Politics and International Relations and Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College. He received his PhD in political science from Humboldt University Berlin in 2015. His research focuses on elections, political parties, and the transformation of political competition and democratic representation in post-industrial societies. Before joining the University of Oxford, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, World Politics and the Journal of Politics. He is the Principle Investigator of the project “Social Status and the Transformation of Electoral Behavior in Western Europe” which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He also serves on the diversity committee of the European Political Science Association.

LSE holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at LSE events do not reflect the position or views of the London School of Economics and Political Science.