Attributes, abstractions, and combinations: a new taxonomy for studying how parties invoke social groups

Abstract

Research increasingly examines which social groups political actors refer to. Yet, existing approaches typically inherit classifications shaped by demand-side perspectives or conflate how groups are defined with how they are framed. We propose a novel, attribute-centered taxonomy of social group references that classifies groups by the attributes political actors invoke, organizes these attributes along nested levels of abstraction, and captures attribute combinations when multiple attributes are invoked within a single reference. To demonstrate the analytical value of our taxonomy, we collect original annotations and develop automated classification methods to quantify the group focus strategies of parties in 36 countries over more than 50 years. Our application underscores that socio-structural, constructivist, and deservingness perspectives on party competition primarily operate at different – though overlapping – analytical levels, and yields substantive insights into how different party families construct and mobilize social groups. Our taxonomy, data, and pre-trained classifiers contribute new resources to facilitate future research on social group references in political discourse.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of European Public Policy, 2026 · DOI ↗