Nationalism in Settled Times

Abstract

Due to a preoccupation with periods of large-scale social change, nationalism research had long neglected everyday nationhood in contemporary democracies. This article proposes to shift the focus of this scholarly field toward the study of nationalism not only as a political project but also as a cognitive, affective, and discursive category deployed in daily practice. Integrating insights from work on banal and everyday nationalism, collective rituals, national identity, and commemorative struggles with survey-based findings from political psychology, I demonstrate that meanings attached to the nation vary within and across populations as well as over time, with important implications for microinteraction and for political beliefs and behavior, including support for exclusionary policies and authoritarian politics. I conclude by suggesting how new developments in methods of data collection and analysis can inform future research on this topic.

Trusting diversity: nationalist and multiculturalist orientations affect generalised trust through ethnic in‐group and out‐group trust

“…I will return to consider some of the empirical nuances in greater depth below. Studies agree that, as expected, multiculturalism is associated with more positive perceptions of, or trust towards, immigrants (Bonikowski ; Breidahl, Holtug and Kongshøj ; Wright et al ).…”

Debate on understanding national identity by David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer

“…But the answers they give are nevertheless meaningful. The boxes they tick do not provide space for nuance or texture, but rather require quick, quasi‐automatic, reflex‐like responses (see, e.g., Li : 120–24, Bonikowski : 438, Fox : 42). And because the answers are not premeditated, they give us a glimpse into the netherworld of national identity as who we are.…”

Fast or Slow: Sociological Implications of Measuring Dual-Process Cognition

“…For example, Vaisey (2009) argues that "interview methods engage with [System 2] consciousness alone" and then goes on to assert that fixed response questions, in contrast, mainly involve System 1 processing by their very nature (1687-1689; emphasis mine). 3 Others have also written about the dual processes in a similar fashion, suggesting that certain settings are inherently positioned to activate System 1 processing, such as surveys (Bonikowski 2016;Ignatow 2014;Opfer, Pedder, and Lavicza 2011) and visual cues (Friedman 2016), while in-depth interviews likely only access System 2 processing. These examples point to a trend among some sociologists to talk about the dual processes in a way that, at least on the surface, implies that the processes have clear domains that can be easily mapped on to existing sociological methods.…”