New approaches to measuring central concepts in the study of nationalism: Pre-test results from four countries

The presentation will focus on two long standing concepts included in the ISSP National Identity module. First is the general national pride question battery which includes questions which are one of the most frequently used in the ISSP National Identity module. The majority of authors who analyse these questions see them as measurements of nationalism. However, as was argued recently these measures make international comparison of nationalism problematic, as they tend to suffer from two issues: a) they tend to measure also the perception of general affluence / living standard of a country. E.g. agreeing with “Generally speaking, Switzerland is a better country than most other countries.” does not necessarily imply nationalistic leanings. b) Answers to the questions are influenced by political sympathies the respondent has towards the current government. As was demonstrated, regardless of ideology of the ruling party, people who support a party in the current government also score higher on the nationalism index calculated from the ISSP general national pride items. Part of the problem with this contextuality is the focus of the questions on what can be identified as quotidian concepts of nationalism or nationalism in political practice which are only two of four conceptions of nationalism. At the same time the questions fail to measure support for nationalism as a political ideology which is the latent variable behind other understandings of nationalism. Therefore a set of alternative questions focusing on support for nationalism as an ideology have been introduced in the pre-test. The results show that these new questions provide less context-dependency in measuring nationalism and are better connected to related topics such as xenophobia, aggressive foreign policy or isolationism. The second focus of the presentations is the measurement of the civic-ethnic dichotomy which is also one of the most used question batteries from the ISSP National Identity module. While popular, several authors struggle with assigning individual items to either civic or ethnic definitions of a nation. Even if some authors arrive empirically at an seemingly universal, stable and acceptable assignment of the individual items to civic or ethnic definitions of the nation, doing the same analysis for individual countries reveals that this division is neither stable not universal. Similarly as in the case of measuring nationalism, the problem is the changing contexts in which respondents provide their answers. The person aspiring to become a true [nationality] can by a migrant (in the western countries), it can be a diaspora member (e.g. Hungary, Ireland) or a member of an autochthonous minority (e.g. Slovakia, Spain). Moreover, these contexts can change also over time. The pre-test explores if this problem could be avoided if a simple contrast between becoming a [NATIONALITY] and being born a [NATIONALITY] is offered to the respondent. Based on the pre-test results, we demonstrate, that respondents tending to see nationality as an ascriptive characteristic tend to have more xenophobic views than respondents who side with the option that it is possible to become a particular nationality without being born as one.