Protect the Brand: Elections in the Age of Identity Politics

• In Event: Claiming, Blaming, and Branding

Abstract

The election of diverse political candidates from all races and backgrounds has never been better in most developed democracies. At the same time, this increasing diversity among local as well as national politicians has developed along with the rise in the importance of identity politics, i.e.\ politics based around political, ethnic, or social identities. The growing prominence of identity issues in politics, in conjunction with more diversity among political candidates and elected leaders, has given rise to important new dimensions of discrimination, some occurring within groups who have been historically marginalized. We develop a novel theory of elections to study a particular type of within-group discrimination, specifically, we show how within-group discrimination that arises as a kind of ``brand protection'' whereby members of a minority group will hold their own members to a higher standard than members of the majority group. Brand protection arises in our framework because members of historically marginalized groups want to prevent members from their group who are lower quality from emerging, to avoid eroding others' confidence in future candidates from their group.

Authors

• Livio Di Lonardo, Bocconi University

• Scott Tyson, University of Rochester