ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how crises, which influence current conflicts within a political system, affect the way people identify with politics. It theorizes the necessary conditions for an issue to be incorporated into left-right identification, focusing on three conditions: (1) high and persistent salience, (2) parallel mapping and (3) the persistence of partisan loyalty. As illustrative example the case of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece in the period 2009–2012 is used that shows changes in the content of left—right identification and the creation of a new dimension of political identification.
