Theorists of liberal nationalism argue that national identities serve as essential glue binding a nation. However, national identities can create tensions among subgroups of co-nationals and breed suspicion of outsiders. This chapter analyses the psychology of national attachments to better understand the effects of national identity, identifying three types of national attachment: chauvinism, pride, and identity. The chapter then investigates their differing origins and consequences, focusing on their effects on support for globalization, such as attitudes towards protectionism and immigration. The chapter finds that national chauvinism undercuts and pride enhances support for globalization, underscoring the diverse political effects of national attachments.

Does attachment to a nation enhance or dampen support for the European Union (EU)? Using the 2003 and 2013 ISSP national‐identity modules, we isolate and provide multi‐item measures of two distinct types of national attachment—nationalism and patriotism. We find that they are positively related yet have divergent effects. We validate the measures showing that nationalism increases, and patriotism decreases, support for nationalistic policies (anti‐immigration and protectionism) as expected. We then test the effects of nationalism and patriotism on EU attitudes and find that nationalism increases, and patriotism decreases, opposition to the EU. The presence of a neo‐nationalist political party enhanced the effects of nationalism on opposition to the EU, underscoring the importance of political rhetoric in shaping nationalistic EU opposition. In further support of the rhetoric hypothesis, the most‐educated nationalists are most likely to oppose the EU in countries with a neo‐nationalist political party and vote for such parties when present.

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Should a government repay its international debts even if this imposes severe hardships on its citizens? Drawing on moral psychology, we investigate when people think a government is morally obligated to pay its debts. Participants read about a government that has to decide whether to default on its debt payments or cut vital programs. Across conditions, we varied the number of jobs at stake and whether a full or partial default is required to save them. Overall, most participants judged that a government should pay its debt even when the damage to the debtor is greater than the benefit to the lender. As the damage to the debtor became extreme, participants increasingly said the government should default, but they still judged that defaulting is morally wrong. In Experiment 2, we find in a national sample of Americans that political conservatives were more opposed to default than liberals. We discuss implications for policy, public opinion, and public welfare during economic downturns.

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Behavioral economics is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that incorporates insights from psychology to enrich standard economic models which assume perfectly rational individuals. Empirical research in behavioral economics typically employs incentivized experiments that use economic games with real money on the line. In these experiments, subjects are awarded financial payoffs based on the decisions they make (either individually or as part of a group) in an institutional context designed by the researcher. Behavioral economics is well suited for political science because behavioral economics is interdisciplinary by nature and political science is not bound by any particular research paradigm. At the same time, the method is still novel to many political scientists despite many years of its use to study political topics in a variety of research areas. What unites the application of the method to these areas is the explicit consideration of conflict. For instance, scholars have uncovered social conflict between groups (e.g., voter polarization in the United States) using behavioral games as measures, or they have designed experiments around elections to test theories of candidate and voter behavior. Because of the clear financial incentives, economic experiments are especially useful for studying people’s actual preferences in areas such as redistribution as opposed to their stated preferences. Finally, the method can be used to design institutions that will help overcome conflict over scarce resources. In sum, the strengths of behavioral economics include: (a) the ability to vary institutional contexts; (b) clear incentives that ensure valid measures of preferences; (c) direct measures of behaviors instead of stated intentions which could be confounded by outside pressures such as social desirability.

Prospect theory introduces several anomalies in the behavior of rational agents, including loss aversion, the reflection effect, probability weighting, and the certainty effect. Loss aversion occurs relative to the current state of the world, called reference point. Being loss averse causes people to prefer the current state of affairs above and beyond the expected utility that comes from a risky political change, engendering a status quo bias. Yet, bias is asymmetric due to the reflection effect: people are too tepid toward advantageous platforms or candidates, whereas they are not critical enough of detrimental policies or bad politicians. Both rich and poor citizens take similar stances on nonpartisan issues (such as national defense): this happens because they evaluate uncertain policy changes relative to a reference point. Citizens welcome radical political platforms with greater enthusiasm than incremental proposals. Generally, under prospect theory societal conflict is smoother than under expected utility theory. Older societies are more prone to preserving the status quo than younger ones. These properties also affect the choice of voting rules. Loss aversion induces people to prefer more prudent voting rules and preserve the status quo. Hence, agents favor higher majority thresholds or even unanimity over simple majority in constitutional choice. The status quo bias supports the persistence of policy cycles, with prolonged drifts in one direction before a trend reversal. In sum, loss aversion and other anomalies pinpointed by prospect theory offer insightful predictions with which to study political phenomena.

How much will people sacrifice to support or oppose political parties? Extending previous work on the psychology of interpersonal cooperation, we propose that people's minds compute a distinct cost-benefit ratio-a welfare tradeoff ratio-that regulates their choices to help or hurt political parties. In two experiments, participants decide whether to financially help and hurt the inparty and outparty. The results show that participants were extremely consistent (> 90%) while making dozens of decisions in a randomized order, providing evidence for tradeoff ratios toward parties. Moreover, participants' ratios correlated in the expected directions with partisanship, political ideology, and feelings of enthusiasm and anger toward each party, corroborating that these ratios are politically meaningful. Generally, most participants were willing to sacrifice at least some money to help their inparty and hurt the outparty. At the same time, a sizable minority hurt their inparty and helped their outparty. Welfare tradeoff ratios push our understanding of partisanship beyond the classic debate about whether voters are rational or irrational. Underneath the turbulent surface of partisan passions hide precise calculations that proportion our altruism and spite toward parties.