This article was published in the IAST magazine, 2024/2025 winter issue, exploring the power of belief, from ancient rituals to 21st-century politics. Discover the full PDF here or email us at com@tse-fr.eu for a printed copy.
Multiple threats – including polarization, misinformation and inequality – are undermining our faith in elected governments. Nationalists and populists are also exploiting social and cultural rifts. An expert on autocratic politics and democratic backsliding, IAST’s Felix Dwinger explains why group identity is a pivotal battleground in the war on 21st-century democracy.
How do group identities emerge?
Social identity theory tells us that groups are formed around a set of identity markers – or prototypes – with individuals assigning themselves to the groups they believe to most closely match their own sense of self. A group’s social status matters too. But group identities are not set in stone. They are social constructs whose salience and subjective appeal are shaped by political institutions, such as electoral rules or administrative geography.
Social and political actors can also play a powerful role by manipulating our beliefs about group prototypes. For example, Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party have upended Hungary’s political landscape, replacing the classic left-right cleavage with a cultural divide between conservative-authoritarian nationalists and libertarian globalists. In places as diverse as Venezuela, India, and the US, political entrepreneurs are creating and exploiting similar cultural faultlines.
How do they shape political interaction?
Peaceful and cooperative relations between identity groups are, perhaps surprisingly, much more common than violence and competition. Cooperation is often fostered between people from different ideologies by the fear that disputes between individuals will quickly escalate into group conflict. In-group policing helps, too. We tend to avoid punishing out-group members if we expect the transgressor’s own identity group to sanction them.
Recent scholarship emphasizes localized contact in shaping integration, cooperation, and common bonds in communities with many small groups. When a community consists of a few large groups and is polarized, however, incentives for cooperation decline.
Unfortunately, political actors often have incentives to instil an us-versus-them mentality. US Democrats and Republicans, for example, are increasingly focused on what divides them rather than what they have in common. The danger is that politics turns into a fiercely competitive zero-sum game with devastating outcomes: political favouritism, socioeconomic decline, autocratic rule, full-blown conflict and war.
Why should we care about democracy?
As Winston Churchill remarked: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” In a democracy, you can lose a political contest today but be confident that you will get another chance to win tomorrow.
Research has shown that democracy has many socially desirable outcomes, such as improving public health, literacy rates and income inequality. Admittedly, some studies suffer from threshold or pro-democracy biases. However, it does seem clear that democratic processes mitigate abysmal outcomes from economic crises. By promoting economic stability, democracy can benefit all risk-averse individuals.
How do democracies die?
A military coup used to be the typical cause of death. Over the past three decades, however, democracies became two to three times more likely to be undermined from within as elected politicians hollow out the institutional foundations that brought them to power.
Manipulation of elections undermines the potential of citizens to hold incumbents accountable. This happened in Nicaragua’s 2021 vote when the Ortega administration arrested opposition leaders. In their thirst for power, incumbents can also weaken other pillars of democracy. Poland’s PiS party, for example, has used unconstitutional legislation and procedural obstructions to keep vacancies in the judiciary open and undermine the court system.
How have democracy and identity influenced Russia’s war on Ukraine?
One of my current research projects suggests that Ukraine’s democratization and subsequent economic progress offer ordinary Russians a glimpse of their potential for development under democracy. In this context, an autocrat might choose to disrupt democratic progress abroad to avoid facing a future revolt at home. But this will only happen if the domestic audience believes both countries have a shared identity, as is the case for Russian perceptions about Ukraine. I am also looking further afield to find out whether this reasoning is more generalizable.
Who is winning the war on democracy?
The jury is still out. The recent electoral turnover in Poland is a strong positive signal. Other developments in Hungary, the UK, or France suggest that democratic forces can close ranks and coordinate when push comes to shove. But democracy also faces new threats from cyberwarfare and social-media propaganda. Russia and China may be using such strategies to attack the democratic integrity and social fabric of liberal societies. And the 2024 US presidential elections have not improved the prospects for global democratic stability either, to say the least.
FIND OUT MORE For more on Felix’s research, visit his personal website. He also contributed to our Crossing Channels podcast on the power of political protest.
