Why Leaders Intensify Identity Entrepreneurship: Anti-Corruption Pressure and the Solidarity Mechanism in Peru

ABSTRACT Why do leaders intensify identity entrepreneurship? Existing scholarship treats it as a structural constant, available where cleavages are salient, rather than a behavior whose intensity varies with political conditions. Working within the instrumentalist tradition of social identities, this article theorizes anti-corruption pressure as a cause of that variation. Such pressure varies in biographical content (whether media revelations, congressional proceedings, and prosecutorial acts name the leader and the family), and this content makes legal exposure translatable into a persecution frame. When credible, the translation activates a solidarity mechanism with two outputs emerging at different rates: a loyal base among identity-linked publics whose disapproval attenuates independently of programmatic performance, and endorsement from identity-led social organizations that raises the political costs of accountability. Credibility requires a pre-political biographical anchor; prior polarization and macroeconomic deterioration relax the strategy’s costs. Process tracing of peripheral identity entrepreneurship (PIE) during Pedro Castillo’s presidency in Peru (2021–22) illustrates the argument.