Making Identities Safe for Democracy

Normative democratic theory assumes that citizens hold representatives accountable for securing their goals and interests. Contemporary research on identity-protective, motivated reasoning and group polarization has reignited a debate within democratic theory about the effects of partisan and other collective identity attachments on democratic accountability. Identity-politics skeptics may seek to mitigate the pernicious influence of race, gender, partisan, and other identities to preserve democratic accountability, limit the domain of democratic authority, or turn away from democracy altogether. Identity-politics optimists argue, contra skeptics, that identities are useful heuristics for navigating the political world to identify those with shared interests and goals, and that they stimulate political engagement among groups of citizens who have been marginalized and alienated. In this article, we defend a qualified form of optimism about the contribution of collective identities to democratic accountability that crucially depends on citizens taking up certain civic responsibilities.We join this debate by calling attention to the agency that citizens can exercise to determine how their identities contribute to holding representatives accountable. We also call attention to the importance of intragroup heterogeneity ...