The data were collected to study how the long-term transformation of advanced democracies has given rise to a new social cleavage between universalism and particularism, and how this cleavage structures voting behaviour. Most of these countries are seeing both growing polarisation between the New Left and the Far Right and increasingly fragmented party systems. Against this background, the project asks how new cleavages form, and focuses on the role of group identities in that process. The main questions are: how socio-structural change in knowledge economies (education, class, urban–rural residence) shapes people's subjective group identities; which of these identities become politicised as in-groups and out-groups of party electorates; and whether voters come to see parties as representatives of specific social groups. The analyses draw on the survey data published in this project. The surveys measure closeness to seventeen social groups, how respondents link these groups to parties, open-ended descriptions of in-groups and out-groups, political attitudes, issue salience, and propensities to vote for each party.
The dataset provides information for UK, Germany, France and Switzerland (representative population samples) on political group identities, party preferences, political attitudes and socio-demographics. The survey was fielded by the survey company Bilendi between November 2020 and January 2021. For more information on survey design, measurement etc, please see in the "results section below the reference to Bornschier et al. (2024 as the key reference for this project.
