Overview

The Identity, Community, and Participation working group focuses on how identity and community influence political participation in the United States. Identity –nationality, race, gender, class–has been used to define the limits of acceptable political participation throughout our country’s history, while communities are a key locus of both political engagement and citizen-state interactions. Questions about how these variables interact are therefore long-standing.

The group addresses political participation in a historical moment defined by explicit race-and ethnicity-based political appeals, debates over the relationship between gender and power, evidence that the political preferences of the poor go unheard in the political system, and street demonstrations taking place in communities around the country.

The working group focuses on supporting early career scholars in the field. To this end, the group hosted an open call for proposals for participation in a research design workshop that was held in February 2019. A subset of workshop participants also received research funding for their workshopped projects. A list of the 2019-2020 Identity, Community, and Participation fellows can be found here. 

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Working Group Co-chairs

Claudine Gay
Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and American Studies and Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

Zoltan Hajnal
Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego

Members

Andra Gillespie Associate Professor of Political Science, Emory University

Hahrie Han
Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

Adam Levine
Associate Professor of Government, Cornell University

Dara Strolovitch
Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Affiliated Faculty, Department of Politics, Princeton University

Richard Yeselson
Contributing Editor, Dissent Magazine

The following contributors have also supported the mission of the working group:
Elisabeth Clemens (University of Chicago), Cathy Cohen (University of Chicago), Katherine J. Cramer (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Larry Bartels (Vanderbilt University), Mickey Edwards (Aspen Institute), Archon Fung (Harvard University), Marc J. Hetherington (Vanderbilt University), Alexander Keyssar (Harvard University), Amy Lerman (University of California, Berkeley)