And if they don't dance, they are no friends of mine: Exploring boundaries of national identity

Abstract

National identity is widely used to explain anti-immigrant attitudes and thus the appeal for right-wing (populist)parties. Yet, consensus on how to capture national identity is lacking. This article identifies ideal-typical patterns of national boundary making across 42 countries and more than 25 years beyond the ethnic-civic dichotomy and addresses the multidimensionality of national identity. Using latent class analysis and cluster analysis, four ideal-typical conceptions of nationhood are identified and shown to be differently related to national attachment, national pride, and national chauvinism. Overall, the results close the methodologicalempirical gap between classical approaches and recent inductive approaches to national identity and demonstrate that national identity is a cross-cultural phenomenon with distinct types.

Careless whisper: Political elite discourses activate national identities for far‐right voting preferences

“…Crucially, the degree to which immigrants are recognised as outsiders and as threatening should depend on the narrowness of the idea of the national in-group. Supporting our decision, previous works find that exclusionary conceptions are strongly related to national attachment, pride and chauvinism (May, 2023) and that conceptions of nationhood outperform the other dimensions in strength when analysing the effect of different dimensions on right-wing voting (Lubbers & Coenders, 2017) and attitudes connected to right-wing voting (Hjerm, 1998a).…”

“…In line with a new person‐oriented directive in national identity research (Bonikowski & DiMaggio, 2016; Ditlmann & Kopf‐Beck, 2019; Hjerm, 1998b; Trittler, 2017), we argue that conceptions of nationhood are more complex, because individuals employ and combine criteria based on underlying images beyond this distinction. In fact, Helbling et al (2016, p. 752) and Hjerm (1998a, p. 341) find that either only a few respondents or no respondents favour ethnic criteria without also embracing civic criteria, suggesting a continuum from inclusive to exclusive conceptions, while Trittler (2017), May (2023) and Bonikowski and DiMaggio (2016) demonstrate differently understood criteria based on these underlying images.…”

“…Based on recent advances (Bonikowski & DiMaggio, 2016) recommending person-centred methods to analyse individually held images of the national in-group, we follow May (2023) and employ LCA together with cluster analysis (CA) in a cross-country design.…”

“…Advancing works in the American context, we analyse the role of national political party elites that embrace exclusionary issues in activating national identities. Building on recent developments in national identity research (Bonikowski & DiMaggio, 2016, 2022Eger & Hjerm, 2022a, 2022bMay, 2023), we analyse how specific conceptions of nationhood drive this relationship.…”

Introduction to the special issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology on “National identity, nationalism, patriotism, and globalization”

“…The notion of ordering national identity concepts by the degree of “intensity” instead of by the established multi-dimensional distinctions appears in other recent work, too: May (2023) uses LCA to analyze a very large set of survey samples from many countries and from three time points in regard to the “ethnic” versus “civic” framing of national belonging. Like Kasianenko, May uses a theoretically defined subset of national identity-related items; in her case, those that are traditionally used to measure the ethnic and civic dimensions of national identity.…”