Complex Political Identity

Justice and equality have been guiding visions in the American political project. However, a troubled and violent history on matters of identity has created a reality where racial, gender, and ethnic inequalities persist in several sectors: healthcare, education, criminal justice, and politics, being a few. Given the large consequences of voting outcomes on inequality, we can’t treat the study of political identity as another quirk of the natural world: It requires creative models and methods for studying diverse populations. And it requires the disabuse of assumptions, narratives, and tropes.

We propose that the complex systems science interdisciplinary toolkit is already well-suited to broadly enhance our understanding of the relationship between social and political identity. To begin this project, this working group will bring together a small number of scholars from different fields to generate novel interdisciplinary research, with the goal of constructing an empirically testable theory of complex political identity. If we are successful in our efforts, then the study of how and why people vote can offer more than electoral post-mortems that explain why the candidates we love or hate won or lost. Rather, the study of complex political identity can open a window into understanding identity more broadly, with its dynamism, and offer lessons for how society operates and where it is headed.