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At the beginning of this volume, Elkink and Farrell (Chapter 1) noted the importance of identity as an important determinant of voter behaviour. Earlier chapters focused on the consequential impacts of identities, demonstrating how identity plays a crucial role in shaping voters’ attitudes to elections (see Chapter 2), and their support for the political system (see Chapter 3). The other side of the coin is the factors that help shape voter identities. In trying to address this, scholars have concentrated on various political and social cleavages ranging from ideological divisions to the importance of values (Inglehart 1990, 1997) and party identification (Campbell et al. 1960; Green et al. 2002). Nevertheless there has been a notable decline in the explanatory value of these structural determinants when it comes to explaining voting (Franklin et al. 1992; Jansen et al. 2012). More and more, short-term factors such as party leaders …