How ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ Relates to Voting- Structure and Identities in Switzerland

• In Event: Divisions and Cleavages in Contemporary Europe

Abstract

The last decades have seen political actors on the left and far right increasingly mobilizing voters in terms of – oftentimes culturally connoted - group identities. However, there is surprisingly little research on the social identities that voters themselves, subjectively, perceive as relevant for drawing politically relevant group boundaries, even though integrating these identities enhances our understanding of the motivations and implications of electoral realignment. In an online survey, we asked a population-representative sample of Swiss citizens about their sense of belonging to a series of social groups (through open-ended and closed questions), about the relative importance they ascribe to specific group memberships (through a conjoint experiment), as well as about their partisan preferences. Based on this data, we identify salient social identities among voters of left, center-right, and far-right parties. Building on research in the tradition of social cleavage theory, we include salient in-groups and out-groups as factors explaining vote choice. Our results show that while the electorates of the left and the far right in Switzerland strongly differ in terms of education and occupational class (both as ascriptive and self-perceived characteristics), their subjective social identities refer most strongly to socio-culturally defined groups (such as nationality, language, origin, cosmopolitanism, and rural/urban belonging). Including the most important subjective group identities and demarcations in a multivariate model predicting party choice increases model fit massively for both the left and the far right, but not for center parties.

Authors

• Simon C. J. Bornschier, University of Zurich

• Céline Colombo, University of Zurich

• Silja Haeusermann, University of Zurich

• Delia Zollinger, University of Zurich