Strategic Identity-Priming: Cognitive Constraint Mechanism for Palatable Policy?

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics III & Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Societies
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Comparative Politics III

Abstract

Populist politicians may come to power by opportunistically exploiting and inflaming protracted social tensions and focusing on “identity-inflected” issues and language. Recent examples also suggest some may use this strategy to draw attention away from failures of governance. However, some may also use identity as a primer to bind policy issues to identity ones by stoking social tensions to elicit sentiments surrounding social identity while publicly addressing policy issues that may have no coherent logical linkage to the social identities being evoked. The mere discursive association may generate transitive support by turning policy attitudes into social signals. I investigate two potential implications of such a strategic cognitive constraint mechanism undergirding this type of identity priming. First, identity-priming may serve to enhance coalitional adhesiveness when the policy demands of a coalition’s base are multidimensional, fractionalizing or irreconcilable. Second, some may use it to coat the “bitter pill” of austerity by linking identity issues to macroeconomic policy in a way that reinforces coalitional social bonds. I use longitudinal content analysis of executive office political speech in Brazil and Argentina to investigate whether (or under what circumstances) coalition defections or the introduction of austerity legislation increase executive identity-priming.

Author

• Marika Danielle Csapo, Utah State University