Political Shades of ‘we’: sociotropic uncertainty and multiple political identification in Europe

Identity complexity in the sense of people holding multiple, concurrent affiliations, is taken for granted in modern societies. Yet we know very little about what factors stimulate or instead mitigate identification with multiple political communities. It is usually assumed to go hand-in-hand with globalization and other macro-level trends, but empirical research on this issue is scarce. In this article, we examine how sociotropic uncertainty mitigates multiple political identification. We investigate multiple identification with respect to three political communities: the city, the country and the EU. We show, using Eurobarometer data from 25 EU countries, that political distrust, negative economic expectations and societal pessimism all lead individuals to identify with less political communities concurrently. The implication is that the kinds of multiple, cross-cutting identities often invoked by theorists of globalization are hindered by uncertainty and pessimism about the enterprise.