ABSTRACT
This chapter looks to how coalitions can potentially prioritize and reconstruct identities, and how historical institutionalist legacies shape what kinds of coalitions are available to determine political identities. It moves beyond Frymer in arguing that coalitions matter not just in whether the minority is captive or not, but also in whether the coalition is reconstructive or not in shaping identities. The investigation of coalitions has long preoccupied scholars of minority political incorporation, for the simple reason that minorities often do not have enough population or wealth on their own to influence society. If reconstructive political coalitions are an important medium through which minority groups achieve political incorporation, then what needs to be explained is why reconstructive coalitions appear in some contexts but not in others. A coalition that involves active rearticulation of old identities into new, broader identities would be more reconstructive than a coalition that only promotes silence about the stigmatized minority identity.
