Who Counts as “One of Us”? Sociocultural Belonging and the Boundaries of the Nation

This paper investigates how majority populations evaluate who counts as “one of us”, focusing on the sociocultural boundaries that define national membership. While a rich literature documents how national identity shapes attitudes and political behavior, far less is known about the criteria people use to judge whether others belong to the nation in the first place. I develop a framework that distinguishes legal belonging from sociocultural belonging, the recognition by others that an individual embodies the cultural, moral, and social markers associated with the national community. The framework theorizes that, in Eastern Europe, sociocultural belonging is shaped simultaneously by elective behaviors (economic productivity, prosociality, tradition-keeping) and by ascriptive traits (such as skin color), with Social Identity Theory (SIT) predicting that people exclude those who threaten the nation’s moral distinctiveness. To test these expectations, I field a conjoint experiment conducted on a nationally representative YouGov sample in Romania (N = 2,238; fall 2025). Respondents evaluated profiles varying in skin tone, employment status, welfare history, criminal record, community orientation, and attachment to traditional culture. Results mostly align with the theoretical expectations: profiles signaling idleness, welfare dependence, and criminality receive significantly lower ratings of sociocultural belonging, consistent with SIT’s emphasis on moralized boundaries. Darker skin tones also sharply reduce perceived belonging, suggestive of racial hierarchies. Lastly, prosocial orientation increases perceived belonging, but cultural traditionalism does not. The study contributes to research on national identity, nationalism, and boundary-making by identifying the elective and ascriptive mechanisms through which majority populations differentiate insiders from outsiders.