Whither Identity? National Identity and Political Behaviour

Over the past few years, the study of the relationship between people’s national identity and their political behaviour has attracted increasing attention. Events like Brexit, mass migration, the emergence of populist parties, the use of fake news or the recent economic crisis have again triggered a revival of interest in the effect of national identity on political mobilization or on vote choice. As a result of these shocks, the study of whether people’s ingrained convictions or preferences change over time is again gaining traction within political science. For instance, recent works are starting to analyse to what extent individual’s preferences are malleable to key contextual circumstances (Neundorf & Soroka, 2018; Siroky, Mueller, & Hechter, 2017). In addition, theoretical and empirical works have shown that an individual’s national identity constitutes an important predictor for far-right voting, voting for populist parties or for how citizens assess the role of the EU institutions, among others (Hobolt, 2016; van Spanje & de Vreese, 2011). Yet, most works depart from the idea that people’s national identity constitutes a stable trait (M. Guinjoan & Rodon, 2016). In other words, albeit with a few exceptions, conventional wisdom states that an individual’s national identity is ingrained in his/her mind and very rarely changes over time. This assumption has largely remained untested, which casts potential doubts on some of the empirical relationships identified so far. Thus, and despite the numerous contributions made in recent years, there are several gaps that still remain in our understanding of the role of national identity in political behaviour. First, it is still not clear whether and the extent to which the occurrence of certain political events are able to change an individuals’ identity or its salience (Charnysh, Lucas, & Singh, 2015; Transue, 2007). Hitherto, we know that identity matters, but it is still unknown under what conditions it does, why some individuals give greater salience to the identity component of politics than others or why the same individual gives greater salience to identity in some contexts than in others (Loewen, Heroux-Legault, & de Miguel, 2015; Rodon & Guinjoan, 2018). Following the theoretical debate built up so far, one can think of different mechanisms or moderators that increase/decrease the salience of identity, such as individual characteristics (personality traits, preferences over redistribution, authoritarian predispositions…) or contextual circumstances (political competition, the structure of the media…). Second, most existing literature has devoted little efforts to causally identify why a particular national identity is formed or changes (Chen, Lin, & Yang, 2018). In particular, the occurrence of (exogenous) events such as mass migration, refugees’ crises, terrorism, or climate change catastrophes, among others, emerge as a unique opportunity to understand how identity operates. Hitherto, as we stressed before, it is largely assumed that national identity is created early on through a socialization process that starts with the family and continues with other agents of political socialization (Hierro, 2015). Yet, the interaction between big events and the role of other agents of political socialization that come at an early stage in people’s life, such as trade unions, political parties, or even the workplace, is still largely unknown. Third, the processes of de/recentralisation experienced in recent years in several democratic countries have occurred in parallel with the increasing importance of regional identities (Paasi, 2009; Sorens, 2005). In regions that do not hold nationalist aspirations, individuals develop non-exclusive national and regional identities, while in regions that have strong decentralization demands, some individuals may perceive that national and regional identities are different (Keating, 1998). In the latter contexts, individuals are often confronted with two national realities and they are regularly cross-pressured between the two (Hierro & Gallego, 2018). How do these individuals decide? Do individuals decide differently when the national and the regional identity is seen as complementary rather than as independent? Despite recent findings, future works can shed light on what is the voting decision-making process of these groups or whether their dual identity is more likely to change, given some circumstances. Along these lines, the national-regional argument can also be extended to the European level. The sense of personal identification with Europe, in a cultural or political sense, is still not dominant among the electorate, but it is emerging among a small but influential segment of the population (Inglehart, 1970; Kuhn, 2011). What events trigger a greater salience of the European national identity? How is the European national identity formed in the first place? Does the European identity play a relevant role in the assignation of blame, the attribution of responsibilities or the vote choice (Marc Guinjoan & Rico, 2018)? Fourth, the previous debate is particularly relevant in contexts where a national minority seeks further decentralization or, as in the case of Scotland or Catalonia, even independence. Recent works have examined the effect of the economic crisis or immigration, among others, on the upsurge of secessionism (Cuadras-Morató & Rodon, 2018; Medeiros, Gauvin, & Chhim, 2015), but we know fewer things about whether and how these events may have changed people’s national identity—or moderated its effects (Tormos, Muñoz, & Hierro, 2015). Fifth, the study of national identity has merely been conducted from the perspective of the individual. However, the role of parties in using identity to mobilize the electorate is less understood. Under what conditions political formations increase the salience of identity? Which are the issues raised by parties that have the potential to modify the effect of identity? As Riker highlighted, and recent research has confirmed, parties act strategically and increase the salience of a second dimension—that is, a different cross-cutting issue—when they are losers in the first dimension. Does this logic also apply to national identity? Under what circumstances? Hitherto, much less ink has been spilt on whether big shocks have changed parties’ strategies regarding national identity and its implications for vote choice and turnout. Overall, the proposed Workshop will assemble articles that further our understanding of the role of national identity in politics. We especially welcome papers that employ national identity as an outcome and that take an empirical approach. We will pay special consideration to proposals using experimental or quasi-experimental designs that aim at analysing how big political, economic or social events affect people’s national identity. We are also open to mixed methods approaches, to papers that employ national identity as an explanatory variable and to methodological papers that seek to better operationalize (national, regional, European…) identity. To sum up, this Workshop aims at bringing together different scholars in order to expand the work done so far on national identity and thus advance the study of its role in political behaviour. In addition, the intention of the workshop is to sow seeds for new areas of empirical research and new theoretical and methodological approaches to national identity. We hope this Workshop will have wide-ranging theoretical and empirical implications that can allow us to better understand the unfolding of recent political events. References Charnysh, V., Lucas, C., & Singh, P. (2015). The Ties That Bind. Comparative Political Studies, 48(3), 267–300. Chen, W.-L., Lin, M.-J., & Yang, T.-T. (2018). Curriculum and National Identity: Evidence from the 1997 Curriculum Reform in Taiwan. Cuadras-Morató, X., & Rodon, T. (2018). The dog that didn’t bark: on the effect of the Great Recession on the surge of secessionism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–20. Guinjoan, M., & Rico, G. (2018). How Perceptions of Inequality Between Countries Diminish Trust in the European Union: Experimental and Observational Evidence. Political Psychology, 39(6), 1289–1303. Guinjoan, M., & Rodon, T. (2016). A Scrutiny of the Linz-Moreno Question. Publius, 46(1), 128–142. Hierro, M. J. (2015). Crafting identities in a multinational context: evidence from Catalonia. Nations and Nationalism, 21(3), 461–482. Hierro, M. J., & Gallego, A. (2018). Identities in between. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 62(6), 1314–1339. Hobolt, S. B. (2016). The Brexit vote: a divided nation, a divided continent. Journal of European Public Policy, 23(9), 1259–1277. Inglehart, R. (1970). Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity. Comparative Politics, 3(1), 45. Keating, M. (1998). The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Kuhn, T. (2011). Experiencing European Integration. Transnational Lives and European Integration. Loewen, P. J., Heroux-Legault, M., & de Miguel, C. (2015). Nationalism and ethnic heterogeneity: The importance of local context for nationalist party vote choice. Electoral Studies, 39, 129–141. Medeiros, M., Gauvin, J.-P., & Chhim, C. (2015). Refining vote choice in an ethno-regionalist context: Three-dimensional ideological voting in Catalonia and Quebec. Electoral Studies, 40, 14–22. Neundorf, A., & Soroka, S. (2018). The origins of redistributive policy preferences: political socialisation with and without a welfare state. West European Politics, 41(2), 400–427. Paasi, A. (2009). The resurgence of the ‘region’ and ‘regional identity’: Theoretical perspectives and empirical observations on regional dynamics in Europe. Globalising the Regional, Regionalising the Global, 35(1), 121–146. Rodon, T., & Guinjoan, M. (2018). When the context matters: Identity, secession and the spatial dimension in Catalonia. Political Geography, 63. Siroky, D. S., Mueller, S., & Hechter, M. (2017). Cultural legacies and political preferences: the failure of separatism in the Swiss Jura. European Political Science Review, 9(02), 303–327. Sorens, J. (2005). The Cross-Sectional Determinants of Secessionism in Advanced Democracies. Comparative Political Studies, 38(3), 304–326. Tormos, R., Muñoz, J., & Hierro, M. J. (2015). Endogenous identities? How the independence debate is reshaping Catalans’ identity (No. Paper presented at the Fòrum Rosa Virós 2015 (Barcelona, 4th June 2015)). Transue, J. E. (2007). Identity Salience, Identity Acceptance, and Racial Policy Attitudes: American National Identity as a Uniting Force. American Journal of Political Science, 51(1), 78–91. van Spanje, J., & de Vreese, C. (2011). So what’s wrong with the EU? Motivations underlying the Eurosceptic vote in the 2009 European elections. European Union Politics, 12(3), 405–429. Profile of the participants and type of papers (300 WORDS) Toni Rodon is a Research Officer at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He works at the ERC project EUDEMOS, led by Prof. Sara Hobolt. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford University (2014-2016) and at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research interests include ideology, electoral participation, political geography and political parties, as well as public opinion and the study of nationalism. www.tonirodon.cat Marc Guinjoan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, working in the research group Democracy, elections and citizenship. Before that, he worked as a researcher at the Making Electoral Democracy Work project in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at UPF (Barcelona). His research interests include electoral behaviour, political parties, decentralisation processes and identities, as well as populism and political psychology. www.marcguinjoan.cat Toni Rodon and Marc Guinjoan have both extensively published in peer-reviewed journals. Their publications cover different sub-fields of political behaviour, such as the study of identity or decentralization, vote choice, the strategy of political parties or the effect of big events on people’s attitudes and behaviour. Most importantly, both Toni and Marc have attended several conferences and congresses, acting as presenters or discussants, and have ample experience on coordinating and organizing workshops or seminars.