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Social cleavage theory suggests that social structure translates into politics through the mobilization of collective identities. This study focuses on exactly this translation, paying special attention to the political supply side of group formation. In the survey experiment presented here, we explore the bounded malleability of group identities in contexts of electoral realignment by priming voters to think about party politics in their country as centering on a) the (newer) universalism-particularism divide or b) the (older) state-market divide.

This study includes two survey experiments designed to investigate how structural transformations of the economy and society affect identities that underlie a second ‘universalism- particularism’ dimension of politics. These two survey experiments focus respectively on whether 1) increasing inequality between educational groups and 2) increasing inequality between spatially defined groups might exacerbate identity-based political divides.