Sociology

Cleavage (geology)

Pure mathematics

Identity (music)

Universalism

Dimension (graph theory)

Mathematics

Politics

Aesthetics

Ingroups and outgroups

Machine learning

Engineering

Philosophy

Political science

Collective identity

Psychology

Geotechnical engineering

Computer science

Fracture (geology)

Social psychology

Multidimensional scaling

American Journal of Political Science

Fundamental transformations of underlying cleavage structures in advanced democracies should become evident in new collective identities. This article uses quantitative text analysis to investigate how voters describe their ingroups and outgroups in open‐ended survey responses. I look at Switzerland, a paradigmatic case of electoral realignment along a “second,” universalism–particularism dimension of politics opposing the far right and the new left. Keyness statistics and a semi‐supervised document scaling method (latent semantic scaling) serve to identify terms associated with the poles of this divide in voters’ responses, and hence to measure universalist/particularist identities. Based on voters’ own words, the results support the idea of collective identities consolidating an emerging cleavage: Voters’ identity descriptions relate to far right versus new left support, along with known sociostructural and attitudinal correlates of the universalism–particularism divide, and they reveal how groups opposed on this dimension antagonistically demarcate themselves from each other.

Cleavage Identities in Voters’ Own Words: Harnessing Open‐Ended Survey Responses