Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Political Science and Social Identity

只有当公民获得足够的政治和政策知识时，民主政府才能承担责任。在许多情况下，政治家是这些信息的最重要来源，而当前政治的一个众所周知的特征是，这些信息往往以社会身份的修辞形式表达。对社会身份的诉求引起了选民的共鸣，因为选民可能缺乏其他政治信息来源，而且因为共同的群体成员身份指导选民在做出决定时使用哪些信息以及哪些信息来源可能是可靠的。然而，由于政府官员通常比选民更了解政策的内容和后果，因此可能会有人担心，对社会身份的诉求可能会使选民支持对他们不利的政策。这个项目的重点是社会身份诉求的利益和成本之间的潜在权衡。虽然社会身份诉求在政治中很常见，但我们对社会身份影响政治行为的机制知之甚少，因此我们也不知道从这种权衡中可以期待什么。这个项目旨在通过解决两个相关的问题来提高我们的知识：当政治家应该被期望或多或少成功地使用身份要求，以增加对他们的立场的支持，当选举话语可能会被身份要求所主导。通过开发一种新的身份话语理论模型，并在此基础上实施一系列实验室实验，研究人员试图找出个人决策的决定因素，这些决定因素植根于人类行为的其他不可观察的特征，如社会身份，知识水平和对世界的信念。该项目借鉴并有助于政治学，经济学和社会心理学的相关学科。更广泛地说，它丰富了对公民在选举过程中决策的理解。鉴于自由和公正的选举在任何民主国家中发挥的核心作用，该项目也揭示了民主的整体运作。

Democratic government can only be held accountable if citizens acquire sufficient knowledge about politics and policies. In many cases, politicians are the most important sources of this information, and one of the well-observed features of current politics is that this information is often couched in the rhetoric of social identities. The appeals to social identities resonate with voters because voters may lack other sources of political information and because shared group membership guides voters on which information to use and which source of information might be reliable as they make their decisions. Yet because public officials typically know more about the content and consequences of policies than voters do, there might be a concern that appeals to social identities might bring voters to support policies that have unfavorable impacts on them. This project focuses on the potential tradeoff between the benefits and costs of social identity appeals.Although social identity claims in politics are commonplace, we know little about the mechanisms by which social identification influences political behavior and we thus know little as well about what to expect from this tradeoff. This project seeks to advance our knowledge by addressing two related questions: when politicians should be expected to be more or less successful in using identity claims to increase support for their positions and when the electoral discourse may come to be dominated by identity claims. By developing a new theoretical model of identity discourse and implementing a series of laboratory experiments based on it, the researchers seek to pinpoint determinants of individual decision-making rooted in otherwise unobservable features of human behavior such as social identity, level of knowledge, and beliefs about the world. The project draws on and contributes to the related disciplines of political science, economics, and social psychology. More broadly, it enriches understanding of citizen decision making in the electoral process. Given the central role that free and fair elections play in any democracy, the project sheds light as well the workings of democracy overall.