Group Identity and Symbolic Political Behavior

Keith E. Schnakenberg

Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2014, vol. 9, issue 2, 137-167

Abstract: Political expression often revolves around ethnic, religious, or cultural group identities. I develop a game-theoretic model explaining how group identities interact with citizens' social environments to induce political behavior designed to express group identity. Citizens make political choices before engaging in social interactions which may involve members of the individual's ingroup or outgroup. The strength of an individual's group identity is private information and affects payoffs from political behavior and from cooperative behavior in social interactions. Therefore, symbolic political behavior informs social interactions by revealing information about the group identity of the participant. Furthermore, cross-cutting pressures from ingroup and outgroup interactions govern the intensity with which individuals pursue symbolic political behavior. Symbolic political behavior is more common in segregated communities and among members of large majority groups. I illustrate the broad importance of the theory through applications to anti-immigrant activism.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00013055 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00013055

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Quarterly Journal of Political Science from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().