Beyond the civic-ethnic dichotomy: investigating the structure of citizenship concepts across thirty-three countries

Abstract

. The traditional distinction between civic and ethnic citizenship continues to dominate the study of citizenship concepts. In recent years, various authors have questioned the dichotomous character of these concepts. In this article, we empirically investigate the applicability of this dichotomy based on an analysis of International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey data across thirty‐three societies. The analysis demonstrates that this dichotomous structure can indeed be detected and therefore the theoretical dichotomy can be considered as empirically valid. While ethnic citizenship refers most strongly to having national ancestry, for civic citizenship the most important criterion seems to be to obey national laws. However, the ethnic concept of citizenship can also be defined in a negative manner: for ethnic citizenship, obeying the national laws is clearly not a sufficient condition. Further analysis also reveals that the measurement of both concepts is not equivalent cross‐nationally, so that findings on civic and ethnic citizenship are difficult to compare across societies.

From Cultural Discordance to Support for Collective Action

“…Thus, while models of acculturation (Berry, 1997;Bourhis et al, 1997) argue for concordant attitudes towards cultural maintenance to be beneficial for majority-minority relations, the perception of low cultural discordance may, in fact, undermine minority members' support for collective action and be harmful to immigrants' interests in the long run. This may be especially true in the European immigration context, as an ethnic representation of national identity based on common ancestry (Smith, 2001) still remains vivid (Reeskens & Hooghe, 2010) in many receiving countries, and is linked to prejudiced attitudes towards those who do not share the same ethnic ancestry as the majority group (e.g., Meeus, Duriez, Vanbeselaere, & Boen, 2010;Pehrson & Green, 2010;Pehrson, Vignoles, & Brown, 2009). Thus, even immigrants who do not insist on maintaining their cultural heritage and are willing to assimilate may not be guaranteed full inclusion into host society.…”

Measurement Equivalence Across Subnational Groups: An Analysis of the Conception of Nationhood in Switzerland

“…The initial structure was chosen as a function of the EFA results ( Table 1): Having ancestry, being born, having lived in Switzerland for most one's life, being a Christian, and having Swiss citizenship were assigned to a first ethnic dimension. Although previous cross-national studies on the ISSP items tapping the conception of nationhood (Heath et al, 2009;Reeskens & Hooghe, 2010) revealed strong cross-loadings for the ''having the national citizenship'' item, in the Swiss sample, this item was clearly a part of the ethnic dimension. Respecting Swiss political institutions and laws and being able to speak the language were assigned to a second civic dimension.…”

“…For instance, Heath et al (2009) performed exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) on the ISSP conception of nationhood scale for each country separately. Results showed that the ''having the national citizenship'' item hampered configural equivalence (Reeskens & Hooghe, 2010), either by loading on the ethnic factor (i.e., salient loading on the ethnic factor and nonsalient loading on the civic factor) or cross-loading (i.e., salient loading on both factors). The authors explained such variation by the conditions for obtaining citizenship, which differ to a great extent across countries (Brubaker, 1992).…”

“…Although the cross-national comparability of these scales has received considerable methodological attention (Heath, Martin, & Spreckelsen, 2009;Medina, Smith, & Long, 2009;Reeskens & Hooghe, 2010), no study, to our knowledge, has so far examined whether they can be validly compared or pooled in countries with distinct subnational groups. Although some common causes of nonequivalence are less likely to be problematic within a country (e.g., data collection and sampling methods; Heath et al, 2009), distinctive features of the subnational groups, in particular different languages (Davidov & De Beuckelaer, 2010), may jeopardize measurement equivalence.…”

“…The authors explained such variation by the conditions for obtaining citizenship, which differ to a great extent across countries (Brubaker, 1992). It is recommended to discard items that hamper configural equivalence (Reeskens & Hooghe, 2010), as they likely result in model rejection when using MGCFA. In the current study, we examine whether items tapping civic and ethnic conceptions of nationhood,…”