Identity as a Variable in Canadian and New Zealand Politics

When Brubaker and Cooper spoke of the ‘identity crisis’ in the social sciences, they rued the fact that ‘identity’ was both everywhere and nowhere and that its overuse by scholars had turned it into a term that is ‘heavily burdened, deeply ambiguous’.¹ What their plea for shedding the term also demonstrated, however, is the remarkable rise of the concept of identity in the last two decades. Compared to sociology and psychology, political science has been a laggard in taking identity seriously in its explanations of political and social phenomena. Identity has often been treated, like culture, as a residual category. From the early 1990s, however, identity-based explanations, and attention to identity politics as an object of study, have flourished in political science.² Not only has identity begun to be taken more seriously as an explanatory variable in studies of international relations, competing with standard realist accounts of exogenous state interests responding to material incentives, but scholars have also turned their attention to questions of definition, operationalization and measurement of identity as both dependent and independent variable.³