Rallying around the President: When and Why Do Americans Close Ranks behind Their Presidents during International Crisis and War?

Feinstein, Yuval

doi:10.1017/ssh.2016.5

Cited by 36 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Given that our 2004 data were collected three years after the September 11 attacks and about one year after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we expected to observe increases in types of nationalism that place stricter limits on legitimate criteria of national belonging (in line with research on xenophobia in times of crisis) and entail greater pride in and support for both the nation and the state (the “rally around the flag” effect [Feinstein 2016b; Perrin and Smolek 2009; Willer 2004]). We thus expect increases in restrictive nationalism and ardent nationalism and consequent declines in the percentage of respondents assigned to one or both of the other classes.…”

Section: Was 2004 a Typical Year For American Nationalism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Varieties of American Popular Nationalism

2016

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Despite the relevance of nationalism for politics and intergroup relations, sociologists have devoted surprisingly little attention to the phenomenon in the United States, and historians and political psychologists who do study the United States have limited their focus to specific forms of nationalist sentiment: ethnocultural or civic nationalism, patriotism, or national pride. This article innovates, first, by examining an unusually broad set of measures (from the 2004 GSS) tapping national identification, ethnocultural and civic criteria for national membership, domain-specific national pride, and invidious comparisons to other nations, thus providing a fuller depiction of Americans’ national self-understanding. Second, we use latent class analysis to explore heterogeneity, partitioning the sample into classes characterized by distinctive patterns of attitudes. Conventional distinctions between ethnocultural and civic nationalism describe just about half of the U.S. population and do not account for the unexpectedly low levels of national pride found among respondents who hold restrictive definitions of American nationhood. A subset of primarily younger and well-educated Americans lacks any strong form of patriotic sentiment; a larger class, primarily older and less well educated, embraces every form of nationalist sentiment. Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and partisan identification, these classes vary significantly in attitudes toward ethnic minorities, immigration, and national sovereignty. Finally, using comparable data from 1996 and 2012, we find structural continuity and distributional change in national sentiments over a period marked by terrorist attacks, war, economic crisis, and political contention.

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Section: Was 2004 a Typical Year For American Nationalism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Varieties of American Popular Nationalism

2016

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“…In the United States, polling data show a steady decline in trust in government beginning in 2001, when the large rally-round-the-flag effect of 9/11 began to dissipate (Pew Research Center 2017;Feinstein 2016). This suggests that demand for populism in the United States has been increasing.…”

Section: The Evidence: Supply and Demand Sides Of Ethno-nationalist Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethno‐nationalist populism and the mobilization of collective resentment

Bonikowski

2017

British Journal of Sociology

358

169

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Scholarly and journalistic accounts of the recent successes of radical‐right politics in Europe and the United States, including the Brexit referendum and the Trump campaign, tend to conflate three phenomena: populism, ethno‐nationalism and authoritarianism. While all three are important elements of the radical right, they are neither coterminous nor limited to the right. The resulting lack of analytical clarity has hindered accounts of the causes and consequences of ethno‐nationalist populism. To address this problem, I bring together existing research on nationalism, populism and authoritarianism in contemporary democracies to precisely define these concepts and examine temporal patterns in their supply and demand, that is, politicians’ discursive strategies and the corresponding public attitudes. Based on the available evidence, I conclude that both the supply and demand sides of radical politics have been relatively stable over time, which suggests that in order to understand public support for radical politics, scholars should instead focus on the increased resonance between pre‐existing attitudes and discursive frames. Drawing on recent research in cultural sociology, I argue that resonance is not only a function of the congruence between a frame and the beliefs of its audience, but also of shifting context. In the case of radical‐right politics, a variety of social changes have engendered a sense of collective status threat among national ethnocultural majorities. Political and media discourse has channelled such threats into resentments toward elites, immigrants, and ethnic, racial and religious minorities, thereby activating previously latent attitudes and lending legitimacy to radical political campaigns that promise to return power and status to their aggrieved supporters. Not only does this form of politics threaten democratic institutions and inter‐group relations, but it also has the potential to alter the contours of mainstream public discourse, thereby creating the conditions of possibility for future successes of populist, nationalist, and authoritarian politics.

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“…For instance, following the 9/11 attacks, Americans expressed unusually high levels of unconditional support for state institutions and leaders (Feinstein 2016a), which generated the conditions of possibility for the PATRIOT Act and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (Chanley 2002, Kam & Kinder 2007. More recently, the moral panic in Europe and the United States concerning Syrian refugees has been exacerbated by nationalist politicians' exploitation of public fears following the November 2015 Paris attacks (Francis & O'Grady 2015), leading to the reintroduction of border controls in some Schengen Area countries.…”

Section: The Nation In Everyday Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Nationalism in Settled Times

2016

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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.

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Rallying around the President: When and Why Do Americans Close Ranks behind Their Presidents during International Crisis and War?

Cited by 36 publications

References 45 publications

Varieties of American Popular Nationalism

Varieties of American Popular Nationalism

Ethno‐nationalist populism and the mobilization of collective resentment

Nationalism in Settled Times

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