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

只有公民获得足够的政治和政策知识，民主政府才能被问责。在许多情况下，政治家是这些信息的最重要来源，而当前政治的一个明显特征是，这些信息经常以社会身份的修辞来修饰。对社会身份的诉求与选民产生了共鸣，因为选民可能缺乏其他的政治信息来源，因为共同的群体成员资格指导选民在做出决定时使用哪些信息，哪些信息来源可能是可靠的。然而，由于公职人员比选民更了解政策的内容和后果，因此可能会有人担心，呼吁社会身份可能会使选民支持对他们不利的政策。这个项目关注的是社会身份诉求的收益和成本之间的潜在权衡。虽然在政治中主张社会身份是司空见惯的，但我们对社会身份影响政治行为的机制知之甚少，因此我们对这种权衡的期望也知之甚少。这个项目试图通过解决两个相关的问题来提高我们的知识：什么时候政治家应该或多或少地成功地利用身份主张来增加对他们立场的支持，什么时候选举话语可能会被身份主张所主导。通过发展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。该项目借鉴并贡献了政治学、经济学和社会心理学的相关学科。更广泛地说，它丰富了对选举过程中公民决策的理解。鉴于自由和公正的选举在任何民主制度中所起的核心作用，该项目也揭示了民主制度的整体运作。

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.