For the past two decades, the attention given to the concept of “identity” – both in the social sciences and in the world at large – has continued to rise. Multiple disciplines and subfields are producing an expanding literature on the definition, meaning, and development of ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, gender, class, and other identities and their roles in political, social, and economic outcomes. The ubiquity of identity-based scholarship suggests an emerging realization that identities, as Rogers Smith (2002: 302) has observed, are “among the most normatively significant and behaviorally consequential aspects of politics,” yet the literature has remained diffuse. That is, despite this flurry of activity, the social sciences have not yet witnessed a commensurate rise in definitional consensus on the concept of identity.

The intense interest in scholarship on identity, as well as the many kinds of studies this fascination has spawned, has unfortunately helped undermine the conceptual clarity of identity as a variable. The wide variety of conceptualizations and definitions of identity has led some to conclude that identity is so elusive, slippery, and amorphous that it will never prove to be a useful variable for the social sciences. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000) have even argued, in the most important critique of identity scholarship to date, that it is time to let go of the concept of identity altogether and to move beyond a scholarly language that they suggest is hopelessly vague and has obscured more than it has revealed.

This volume outlines a variety of definitions and methodologies for studying social identities in a diverse set of contexts within American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. As such, we hope it will serve as a primer on the analysis and methodology of identity scholarship for a wide range of interested researchers. Political scientists have long enjoyed access to many excellent guides to mainstream theories and methods, yet those wanting to do research on social identities have had to synthesize enormous literatures on their own, with no practical guide to the alternatives they might employ in their scholarship. This volume aims to be such a road map, both analytically and methodologically. The chapters include a broad array of definitions as well as methodological options available for scholarly research on identity, including methods currently in use and some promising newer ones.

The chapters of this volume demonstrate concretely how to conduct identity research using several different methodological options. Each chapter shows how the ideas that underlie identity are applied in the context of individual research and what sorts of insights such projects can yield. In this way, the combined chapters create a whole greater than the sum of its parts; by aggregating the various specific methodological approaches, the text provides a coherent basis for the general examination of identity in the study of political science.

By way of conclusion, we want to try to summarize a very rich set of studies. To this end we focus on four issues. First, we look at the variations in institutional design (our first dependent variable) among the regional institutions as a function of variation in the matrix of independent variables identified in the introduction. Second, we look at the variation in the nature of cooperation across regional institutions (our second dependent variable), as a function of institutional design (our first dependent variable now performing as an independent variable). Here we also highlight similarities and differences in the efficacy across regional institutions. Third, we highlight some tentative findings about the relationship between institutional design and the nature of cooperation. And finally, we set out some arguments and suggestions about extending the research agenda on comparative regional institutional design.

Although we presented the contributors with a list of variables on institutional design and indicators of the nature of cooperation, we did not insist that each chapter writer must address each of these variables and indicators. We allowed them the freedom to decide which of these were most relevant to their case study. In short, we recommended, but did not impose, a matrix of variables and indicators. The result, greater autonomy for the contributors, also created the condition for a rich set of empirical studies. But we are able to find important common ground and make generalizations about similarities and differences in meaningful ways.