Abstract
Politics in many Western democracies have become increasingly personalized; as a consequence, the individual personalities of voters and their social identity are now essential in order to understand political choices. This essay explores the role of social and personal identity, by relating such factors as one’s family, occupation, class consciousness, religion, and personality in general to political choices in order to understand the recent cultural changes in the political scenarios in Italy and Argentina. This research is based on almost 7,000 face-to-face interviews collected between Italy and Argentina from 2014 to 2020.
Highlights
The first part of this research refers to the literature on social identity, based on experiments in social psychology, stating that any form of group-belonging activates both positive feelings in evaluating one’s own group and the Channel and spread all over Europe, during several decades many declared they were trying to “falsify”, rather than verify, their own hypotheses
Unlike most studies on affective polarization, we explore the role of religion, family, profession and class consciousness in order to understand if these social categories can be considered a driver of political identification meant as a social identity
Religion seems only slightly connected with voting for the center, center-right and far-right parties, while the role of the family, though being still strong, doesn’t seem to be related to political choices
Summary
This research stems from a project designed by Alberto Marradi and has been developed by his Italian and Argentinean students and former students – who form a sort of school, known as Marradi’s school2 – under his supervision This community is formed by academicians – professors at different levels; researchers, Ph.D.’s., and Ph.D. students – who share his criticism of the inferiority complex openly shown by many a social scientist vis a vis physics and natural sciences sharing positivistic and neo-positivistic orientations (Marradi 2015; 2017). In reading some “modern” texts in the philosophy of science, and above all some research reports in social sciences, the impression is that not enough steps have been moved beyond the nomothetic excitement of early positivists This comparative research is widely different from other social research due to three main reasons: 1. Even the highest quality comparative research is bound to have recourse to professional interviewers who are hardly aware of the research aims, and by no means are expected to share its spirit
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