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When and why do some social cleavages become politically salient rather than others?
Daniel N. Posner
ABSTRACT
Building on Posner (Posner, Daniel N. 2005. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press), this article describes a framework for organizing the information about a community’s social cleavage structure so as to identify the incentives that individuals face to adopt particular social identities. The framework is parsimonious but powerful: it generates predictions about the social cleavages that will emerge as salient in politics, the lobbying we can expect to see regarding the social categories with which community members should identify, and the attempts that will be made to assimilate or engage in “identity entrepreneurship” to fashion entirely new social identities. The framework also clarifies why partition is unlikely to be a remedy for intractable ethnic conflicts.
Conflicts and controversies can arise out of a great variety of relationships in the social structure, but only a few of these tend to polarize the politics of any given system. There is a hierarchy of cleavage bases in each system and these orders of political primacy not only vary among polities, but also tend to undergo changes over time. Such differences and changes in the political weight of sociocultural cleavages set fundamental problems for comparative research: When is religion, language or ethnicity most likely to prove polarizing? When will class take the primacy and when will denominational commitments and religious identities prove equally important cleavage bases?…Questions such as these will be on the agenda of comparative political sociology for years to come. There is no dearth of hypotheses, but so far very little in the way of systematic analysis.
− Lipset and Rokkan, Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments (1967)
Individuals possess multiple social identities, and societies can accordingly be divided in terms of multiple bases of social cleavage. This raises a critical question: Under what circumstances do political competition and social conflict come to be organized along the lines of one cleavage rather than another? When does politics revolve around religion rather than language? When is a society’s fundamental basis of social division rooted in differences of race rather than country of origin? When does conflict manifest itself along lines of tribe rather than sub-tribe or clan?
Lipset and Rokkan (1967) posed this question nearly fifty years ago and, as they predicted, it remains central to the agenda of comparative political sociology to this day. Some who have tackled the question have located their answers, as Lipset and Rokkan did, in the gyre of history. For these authors, the salience of particular social cleavages depends on the stage of historical development in which the political system happens to be located at the time (e.g. Kronenberg and Wimmer 2012). Others have pointed to the impact of colonial institutions in reifying particular social cleavages over others (e.g. Laitin 1986). Still others have emphasized the emotions attached to particular social cleavages that render them stable (Petersen 2012) or the innate characteristics of particular groups that make attachments to them particularly strong (Horowitz 1985) or that make cross-group differences particularly salient (Sambanis and Shayo 2013). A large number of scholars have, following Schattschneider (1960) and the foundational work of Tajfel et al. (1971), located their answers in the competition inherent in politics. These authors emphasize how the struggle for political power and public resources generates incentives for political actors to embrace or discard particular social distinctions in order to win elections (e.g. Bates 1983; Brass 1991; Chandra 2004; van der Veen and Laitin 2012).
The approach outlined here, which draws on and expands upon the discussion in Posner (2005), adopts this expressly instrumentalist and political orientation. Where it goes beyond other work in this vein – and where it distinguishes itself sharply from primordialist and constructivist approaches to identity politics – is by expressly laying out the implications of the insight that communal groups can be thought of as political coalitions mobilized to secure political power and public resources (Bates 1983).1 The characterization of communal groups as political coalitions is usually deployed as a metaphor to underscore the tendency for social identities to be politicized. The contribution here is to take this approach literally and to trace the implications for both individual-level actions and society-level outcomes of viewing social identities in this manner. The result is an analysis that goes beyond the constructivist recognition that social identities can change to identify the conditions under which they will, the forms they will take, and the actors who will support and oppose these changes.
To do this, I employ a tool called a social identity matrix to organize the available information about a polity’s social cleavage structure. As I show, the tool can be used to identify the incentives individuals face to adopt particular identities and to generate predictions about the social cleavages that will emerge as salient. The power of the framework is that it also provides insights into the lobbying we can expect to observe for the adoption or rejection of particular identities, as well as who is most likely to be engaged in such lobbying. It also generates predictions about the types of individuals who will be most likely to engage in “identity entrepreneurship” – attempts to create novel attachments, and novel social divisions, that might organize the polity in new ways. By pinpointing who stands to lose from the identity-based conflict, the approach also helps us to identify individuals who will have incentives to change their group memberships and hence generates predictions about the social boundaries that are likely to become contested.2
Generating these predictions requires accepting certain assumptions about what individuals value and how the political system is structured. However, these assumptions are consistent with considerable empirical evidence and accurately describe the real-world settings in which many individuals find themselves. Moreover, accepting these assumptions generates substantial payoffs for our understanding of identity politics. The objective is not to suggest that the framework described here provides the only way to think about why some social identities or cleavages become salient rather than others. The goal is to provide a simple, parsimonious way of thinking about social identity that, notwithstanding it spare foundations, provides powerful insights into the dynamics of identity politics.
A particular benefit of the approach is the illumination it provides regarding the (likely un-) usefulness of partition as a solution to ethnic conflict. By clarifying how changing the boundaries of the political arena alters the kinds of identities that become socially and politically salient, the social identity matrix shows how dividing a socially diverse polity into homogeneous new states is not likely to solve the problem of communal conflict. The approach makes it clear that as soon as the boundaries of the political arena change, actors’ incentives change too, and this will give rise to new cleavages in the post-partitioned states. All that partition will do is shift the locus of competition and conflict from one dimension of social cleavage to another. Whether this alters the intensity of the conflict depends on the nature of the intergroup competition on each cleavage dimension, but partition itself will do nothing to change the inevitability of group competition itself.
Some preliminaries
The framework outlined in this article is built around a conceptualization of social identity as fluid and situation-bound. It assumes that individuals possess repertoires of identities whose relevance depends on the context in which the individuals find themselves. It assumes further that social identities are not just situational but instrumental: context affects not just how individuals understand who they are; it also affects the strategic calculations they make about which identity, if adopted, will generate the highest payoffs.3
What, then, determines the payoffs for a given identity choice? Although the rewards of membership in particular groups run the spectrum from material benefits such as access to jobs to non-material advantages such as prestige, social acceptance, or protection against shunning, the approach adopted here focuses on just one factor: the size of the group that the identity defines. The framework assumes that individuals will choose the identity that conveys membership in the group that, by virtue of its size vis-à-vis other groups, puts them in a minimum winning political coalition – and thus in a ...
