National Identity and Populism: Disentangling the Relationships between Nationalism, Patriotism and Populist Attitudes

After the collapse of Communism around 1989, and more recently after being confronted with increasing numbers of refugees and immigrants, national identity has moved from being a bit player to center stage in contemporary political science (Schmidt and Quandt 2018). In parallel, scholars have observed the rise of a national populism in many countries in the Western hemisphere. Regarding their relationship, conventional wisdom argues that national identity and national populism go hand in hand (Bonikowski 2017; Brubaker 2017; de Cleen 2017). Evaluating this link between national identity and populism carefully, we challenge this established perspective. More specifically, we differentiate between two forms of national identity, i.e. nationalism and constructive patriotism. While nationalism is considered as a negative social identity, holding a more restrictive view on national belonging, constructive patriotism is an evaluative dimension of national identity that emphasizes a positive, inclusive social identity built on humanist and democratic values. Recent contributions on populism suggest that people who lack a positive social identity are more susceptible to anti-elitist sentiments and homogeneous conceptions of “the people”, which both are essential dimensions of populism (Spruyt et al. 2016). In our study, we investigate the influence of the two distinct forms of national identity on populist attitudes. We expect that the negative social identity embedded in nationalism contributes to the emergence of populist attitudes as it resonates well with the Manichean world view that underlies populism. Constructive Patriotism, on the other hand, offers a positive social identity decreasing the emergence of populist attitudes. Using the German Longitudinal Election Study from 2017, our analyses indicate that nationalism is positively related to populist attitudes in Germany. Constructive patriotism, however, is not related to any form of populist attitudes. We contribute to this growing research area in several ways. First, we show that the relationship between national identity and populist attitudes depends on the form of national identity. Second, we go beyond structural economic grievances for explaining populist attitudes, by focusing explicitly on the role of identity. Third, we contribute to the endeavor of disentangling populist vote choice and populist attitudes.