Politics as Affirmation-Seeking

"[P]eople may be interested in certain political outcomes because those outcomes will signal, in a psychologically important way, the relative status of various individuals within a society. A person's sense of self-respect may turn in part on the respect authoritative institutional voices accord groups to which the person belongs. According to this view, battles over symbols are not simply preliminary skirmishes over more tangible political stakes, but are struggles over status rewards that are valued in and of themselves."

--Robert Ellickson's Order Without Law (1991, 116)