Dissertation
Beyond Partisanship: Political Identity Profiles in Latin America (Hartlyn, Conover, Hooghe, Huber, Bakker). In my dissertation, I develop a novel framework for describing and analyzing processes of formation and expression of political identities. I apply this framework to the Latin America case and, using novel data, show that contrary to what previous research has concluded, political identities are strong and consequential in this region. I find that political identities associated with charismatic movements (e.g., Chavismo, Peronismo, Fujimorismo) and ideological labels (e.g., left/center/right) are central to the way in which Latin Americans see themselves, have substantive consequences for the way in which they process political information, and shape political attitudes and behavior. To measure these different sets of political identities, I developed multi-item scales uniquely tailored for the comparative study of political identities and use statistical procedures from the psychology literature to provide evidence of the validity of these scales. More generally, findings from my dissertation underscore the importance of carefully theorizing about the characteristic of party systems for the study of political identification and show that, without it, researchers can mischaracterize and misunderstand key political dynamics in the developing world.
Research Interests
- Comparative politics
- Political psychology
- Methods
Publications
Party Politics, Journal of Politics in Latin America, Latin American Research Review