As globalisation makes national boundaries both permeable and contested, conflicts over national identity and related policy issues are bound to increase the salience of citizens' individual national identitiesand, consequently, increase their impact on political attitudes and behaviour. We study the link between ethnocultural and civic dimensions of national identity and turnout and party preferences. After providing a theoretical discussion that integrates conceptions of national identity into established models of turnout and party preference formation, we explore the merit of accounting for these conceptions of national identity in a case study of Germany. Analysing data from two surveys conducted in the period between 2015 and 2017, we show that acceptance of civic criteria of national identity was positively associated with turnout and partisan support for all German parties besides the AfD. Acceptance of ethnocultural criteria was associated with increased support for (centre-) right and decreased support for (centre-) left parties. Some of these patterns differ significantly and in predictable ways between the two data points bracketing the height of the European refugee crisis. These findings suggest that individual conceptions of national identity may be of importance for our understanding turnout decisions and party preferences, but the specific relationships presumably depend on contextual conditions.
The Alternative for Germany party (AfD) has been more successful electorally in eastern than in western Germany. In this paper, we look at nativism coupled with populist attitudes as possible contributors to the 2017 federal electoral outcome. We compare two alternative mechanisms for the varying election results, the first being whether individuals living in eastern Germany are, on average, more nativist and populist inclined; the second, whether nativism and populism are more salient when these voters go to the polls. The results show that there indeed exists a slightly higher level of nativist and populist sentiment among the east German citizens than among the west Germans. This difference concerns older east Germans in particular, who were politically socialised during the German separation. Furthermore, elements of nativist and populist ideas explain electoral support for the AfD in both parts of the country, but nativism appears to be more relevant in the east. Overall, the analysis of the short-term campaign panel data from the German Longitudinal Election Study suggests that the inspected ideational foundations contribute to the east–west gap in AfD support without accounting for it completely.
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