Language, identity and voting

These past decennia, the social science literature on identities saw a consensus growing on the fact that identities are not a fixed, static, essentialist reality but have developed in specific historical and socio-economic contexts. They are, in other words, socially constructed (Gellner 1983, Hobsbawm 1990, Anderson 1983). Therefore it is difficult to measure national identities as an empirical reality. What can be measured though is the extent to which people identify with such a social construct. It is not because they are socially constructed that (national) identities do not exist and ev... Mehr ...