Inductive constructivism and national identities: letting the data speak

Abstract

The literature on nationalism has provided conceptual definitions of national identity that supposedly delineate its underlying empirical manifestations. A binary conceptualization (civic versus ethnic) is widely used by scholars. There are confusion and ambiguity in the definition, however, as well as sense that the prevailing schema does not adequately capture the fluidity and complexity of the phenomenon. We posit that abstract conceptual definitions do not validly capture the way individuals actually experience identification with their nations. Using a methodology that models the distribution of responses to survey questionnaires – latent class analysis – we demonstrate that individuals cluster in two different groups in the way they identify with their nations: nationalists are strongly attached to the nation and more exacting in their criteria for membership, while cosmopolitans display lower identification with the nation and are more inclusive in their desired criteria of membership. These classes are to some degree fluid across indicators and nations. Broadly speaking, however, the configurations are comparable cross‐nationally.

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

“…Together, results of CA (Hjerm, 1998b;Trittler, 2017a) and LCA (Alemán & Woods, 2018;Bonikowski, 2013Bonikowski, , 2016Larsen, 2017), in connection with other alternatives to classical factor-analysis techniques (e.g., Helbling et al, 2016) and qualitative research (Ditlmann & Kopf-Beck, 2019), indicate, first, that the ethnic-civic dichotomy does not hold when capturing individual conceptualisations of nationhood. Second, whereas Helbling et al (2016, p. 752) as well as CA results in general suggest a continuum from liberal to restrictive conceptions of nationhood, the person-centred approaches additionally demonstrate the existence of distinct conceptualisations (Alemán & Woods, 2018;Bonikowski, 2013Bonikowski, , 2016Bonikowski & DiMaggio, 2016;Hjerm, 1998b;Trittler, 2017b) that divergently employ and arrange criteria (and nation-oriented idioms). Furthermore, specific conceptualisations seem to coincide differently with national attachment, national pride, and national chauvinism.…”

“…By examining response patterns, recently introduced person-centred methods (e.g., Alemán & Woods, 2018;Bonikowski, 2013Bonikowski, , 2016Bonikowski & DiMaggio, 2016;Hjerm, 1998aHjerm, , 1998bTrittler, 2017a) allow for the discovery of the underlying conceptualisations of nationhood.…”

The Partisan Sorting of “America”: How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

“…13 To identify varieties of American nationalism, we use LCA, a data reduction method that groups observations on the basis of their shared response patterns across multiple variables-in this case, the 23 nationalism indicators specified earlier. We do so both for theoretical reasons-because we view this relational and inductive approach as most appropriate for measuring domain-specific cognitive representations (Mohr 1998;Knight and Brinton 2017)-and for practical reasons, because this has been a method effectively used in past research to segment nationalist beliefs in survey data (Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016;Bonikowski 2017b;Alemán and Woods 2018), enabling direct comparisons between our results and those of past studies and contributing to the cumulation of knowledge in this domain of inquiry. 14 13 Study replication materials are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WYFB8G.…”

Popular understandings of national identity in Europe: Still a gulf between West and East?

“…Meanwhile, Simonsen and Bonikowski (2020) generated a multilevel LCA model that grouped respondents into latent classes and simultaneously assigned the 41 countries covered by the analysis into distinct groups based on the distribution of the classes within countries. Alemán and Woods's (2018) LCA revealed the existence of two classes of individual identification with the nation‐state—nationalist and cosmopolitan. However, the authors admitted that internal composition of the classes vary by country.…”