Challenging social hierarchy. How interests, status motives and group identities structure democratic competition

The burgeoning literature on voting for the far right shows that what drives voters towards such parties are anxieties about social status, rather than individual interests (e.g. Gidron & Hall 2017; Howe, Szöcsik & Zuber 2022). Influential recent books even call into question whether democratic competition revolves around anything but voters’ group identities (Achen and Bartels 2016; Mason 2018). However, these recent empirical insights have not led to a re-formulation of theoretical models of democratic competition.
This presentation presents a book project that contributes such a re-formulation. I start from the state of the art in social psychology that sees humans as social animals categorizing the world into groups and striving to improve the status of their groups relative to others to feel good about themselves. On this basis, I propose a dynamic account of democracy, arguing that the fact that group identities and status motives matter in elections is a feature, not a bug of representative democracy. Linking voters’ interests and identities in unexpected ways enables political parties to construct new constituencies and challenge social hierarchies. They thereby fulfill a core promise of democracy: treating unequal social orders as amenable to political change, rather than as God-given (Disch 2021).
The book will use three running examples to illustrate how status motives and group identities help explain electoral mobilisation in a diverse range of settings: indigenous mobilization in Ecuador, historical socialist mobilization in Europe, and the rise of contemporary far right parties. All of these examples show 1) that status motives and group identities matter in addition to and sometimes beyond voters’ interests; 2) that parties do not just represent, but create their constituencies as they connect interests, identities and status promises to amend (indigenous), eliminate (socialists) or restore (radical right) social hierarchies.