Political Institutions and Group Identity

Empirically, the formation of political attitudes has been strongly linked to the concept of group identification. Classifications such as race, gender, religion and ethnicity have been shown to be sharp predictors of many aspects of political life including who turns out to vote, how people vote, and the issues that are important to people. Furthermore, many topics that are of interest to political scientists, such as leadership, majority-minority relationships, and coalition formation, are fundamentally group phenomena. However, the relationship between institutions and group identification has received little attention in the formal literature. This relationship is important because individual perceptions of institutional features such as procedural justice and distributive equity have been shown capable of heightening or easing levels of intergroup conflict in certain circumstances.