Political Actors, State Identity, and Regime Type: Rethinking the link between collective identity, the state, and exclusion

Abstract

The access to and exercise of power are at the core of all politics. All political actors compete for power. But competition for power takes place within different rules. The rules that govern the competition, access, and exercise of power constitute the type of political regime. A recurrent inquiry in many scholarly fields has been into the factors that determine, or influence, which rules are going to govern the competition for, access, and the exercise of power. What factors determine regime type? This work highlights an important, yet grossly overlooked and und-conceptualized, factor that affects the type of political regime. I argue that when relevant political actors pursue opposing visions of the identity of the state, they seek the exclusion of their oppo-nents: Opposing visions of state identity constitute an existential discord between political ac-tors. In the context of this fundamental divide, actors resort to exclusion when competing for power. Because exclusion is a hallmark of authoritarianism, the pursuit of opposing visions of state identity (‘dissent on state identity’) is conducive to authoritarianism and unfavorable for democracy. This dissertation makes three contributions. The first is conceptual; it shows that the literature does not adequately conceptualize the identity dimension of the state and illustrates the concep-tual and empirical problems that result from existing conceptualizations. It proposes a new con-ceptualization of state identity that focuses on the symbolic character of the state and shows how it outperforms existing concepts, particularly when examining the relationship between col-lective identity, the state, and regime type. Second, it empirically institutes the general validity of its hypothesis in the 129 countries that exist in the Bertelsmann Transformation Index dataset. Third, it illuminates the causal link between dissent on state identity, exclusion, and authoritari-anism by comparatively examining Turkey’s autocratization (2007-2017) and Tunisia’s democra-tization (2010-2014).