Status Threat and National Identity: How Contemporary Societal Shifts Reshape Attitudes Towards the Nation

Research on globalization and its likely impact on collective and social identities has gained immense traction. Globalization alters economic, political and societal conflict lines resulting in a crosscutting “integration-demarcation” cleavage, which becomes more and more dominant over time. In consequence, a substantial part of the citizenry has adopted attitudes that in combination constitute a backlash against globalization. In particular, this new cleavage arguably fosters and reinforces perceptions of status threat together with the thorough transformation of the industrial sector and changes in “main-stream” cultural values. Research on national identity and nationalism in relation to social status mostly tends to either explain nationalist voting, nationalist parties, or to ad-dress mere parts of national identity by employing rather fuzzy conceptualizations. In this paper, I propose a novel analytical framework for studying this particular type of social identity, which distinguishes between three different dimensions of national identity relating differently to threats to social status. Depending on the respective configuration of conceptions of nationhood, attitudes towards out-groups, and critical engagement with the nation, these dimensions form a wide range of national identities, which previous research labeled ethnic nationalism, blind patriotism, constructive patriotism, etc. First and similar to the literature on the rise of authoritarian or populist attitudes, I argue that conceptions of nationhood likely tend towards more traditional, ethnicity-based definitions of national membership if the respective individual perceives her social status to be under threat. Second, national identities that elevate one’s in-group over any out-group(s) and show outright hostility towards them should be more prevalent under status threat because many individuals are likely to attribute blame for these perceived threats to out-groups and to seek to overcome their experienced insecurity by derogating others. Third, although status threat arguably leads to an increased questioning of political and societal elites’ authority as shown by research on populism, critical engagement with the own nation should decrease and a blind loyalty towards an idealized, supposedly pure national body thrive under status threat. For testing these hypotheses empirically, I rely on an original dataset consisting of a survey conducted in four European countries specifically designed to address the dimensionality of national identity in a way that allows for distinguishing this identity from e.g. populist attitudes or other political ideologies, whose relation to social status is far better understood than that of national identity. In summary, this paper makes four substantial contributions to the existing body of research. Conceptually, I provide a more detailed and comprehensive account of the dimensionality of national identity than previously done. Theoretically, I specifically relate each of these dimensions to several aspects of social status that are likely altered in a quite fundamental way by globalization. Empirically, I present a novel and more fine-grained dataset for assessing the complex nature of individual-level social identities and their relation to social integration as a broader issue. Finally, insights gained in this paper allow for a deeper understanding of the resurgence of nationalist discourse in the political sphere.