Alternative Measures of American National Identity: Implications for the Civic‐Ethnic Distinction

Abstract

Studies of national identity distinguish between ethnic and civic nations and have sought to identify these alternative conceptions of national identity in public opinion. The standard measurement technique is to assess the normative content of American national identity by asking survey respondents to rate the importance of particular traits for making someone a “true” American. We argue that such measures are problematic, chiefly because of the impact of nonrandom measurement error. We explore the influence of using ranking measures instead of ratings, using a survey experiment conducted on a nationally representative sample of Americans in 2008. The ranking method is superior for distinguishing between ethnic and civic conceptions of nationhood and, therefore, for predicting preferences on issues such as immigration policy. We develop a new statistical method that effectively “converts” ratings into scores that approximate rankings, resulting in the creation of more valid measures of both ethnic and civic national identities.

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

“…Perceived threats to a country's distinctive identity and culture drive much anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. and elsewhere (Citrin et al 1990;Hainmueller and Hangartner 2013;Schildkraut 2011;Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007;Wong 2010;Wright et al 2012). Americans almost universally endorse acculturation as a prerequisite to full-fledged membership in the national community-speaking English, holding American values, feeling American, and getting ahead on one's own-and hostility can arise when these conditions are not met (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014b;Newman et al 2012).…”

Immigration, national identity and political trust in European democracies

“…Wright, Citrin and Wand contend that 'whether an individual is ascriptive or civic minded in their conceptualization of national identity…can be conceived of as a continuum, but it is generally thought that there is a meaningful dichotomy of outlooks that it is important to capture ' (2012: 476). While research based on ISSP data finds civic and ethnic identity to be relatively strongly correlated, Wright, Citrin and Wand (2012) convincingly show that this may be an artefact of the approach to measuring national identity used in the ISSP, and that a ranking approach better captures the distinctiveness of civic and ethnic/ascriptive identity. Though the measure of national identity used here is not exactly a ranking measure, it does require respondents to consider their priorities when it comes to national identity and is the closest cross-national survey to use the ranking measure that Wright, Citrin and Wand (2012) advocate.…”

“…The analysis conducted by Wright et al (2012) for the U.S. points us to the potential conclusion that the results for Spain could be an artefact of the measurement of national identity in the ISSP, in that the ratings method used in the ISSP may not always adequately capture the distinctiveness of ethnic and civic identity. For the case of Spain, we have investigated the relationship between our national identity scale and our dependent variable, political trust, to see if the relationship between these is substantially different than in other countries included in our analysis and found that-as would have been expected based on existing analyses (Berg and Hjerm 2010;McLaren 2015)greater emphasis on civic identity is associated with higher political trust.…”

“…Following on from the work of other scholars in this field (Kunovich 2009;Wright 2011a;Wright, Citrin and Wand 2012;Tilley, Exley and Heath 2004;Heath and Tilley 2005), respondents who chose items 3, 4, or 9 might be assumed to emphasize ascriptive identity while respondents who chose items 8 or 10 might be assumed to emphasize civic identity. Because of the forced choice nature of this survey question, investigating whether these items go together empirically is not possible with standard techniques like factor analysis.…”

“…Based on the analysis of Wright, Citrin and Wand (2012), we initially considered trying to place these individuals towards the ascriptive side of the scale, as these authors contend 'that there really are only two types of respondents: those who are "pure" civic nationalists and the rest, who are more ascriptive'…”