Consecrating the Imagined Community: Regime Narratives as Cultural Capital and the Persistence of Cleavages in Taiwan

The study of political culture has long sought to understand the stability of democracies by examining the resonance between state structures and citizen orientations. There remains a need to examine mechanisms that links top-down regime narratives to the bottom-up internalization of identity. This paper proposes a Bourdieusian approach to this problem, arguing that political culture should be analyzed as a site of symbolic struggle where the state "consecrates" specific narratives as institutionalized cultural capital. In this framework, state legitimacy is not merely a product of institutional performance or procedural fairness; rather, it is anchored in the state’s power to define and reward specific cultural dispositions, effectively transforming ideological scripts of the "imagined community" into tangible social assets. Using Taiwan as a critical case study, I analyze how successive regimes utilize state institutions—from the education system to global health policy—to transform national narratives into durable, rewarded skillsets. Drawing on exploratory factor analysis and regression modeling of original survey data, I identify three competing dimensions of cultural capital: Pan-Chinese traditionalism, Nativist-authenticity, and an emerging Cosmopolitan-liberalism. These represent distinct cultural repertoires that offer varying degrees of prestige and social utility depending on the dominant political field. A central finding of this research is that regime legitimacy is not adopted uniformly; instead, it is received unequally due to enduring social stratifications. These historical and political processes are mediated through hierarchies of ethnicity, generation, and class, which shape a citizen’s access to different cultural repertoires. Because these cultures are internalized as dispositions (habitus), they extend far beyond electoral behavior to influence broader moral norms and lifestyles. My empirical results demonstrate that these capitals structure social worlds: those with high Pan-Chinese capital favor Confucian ethics and civilizational continuity, whereas holders of Global capital prioritize international connectivity and liberal-democratic distinction. This paper contributes to the ECPR section by demonstrating that the "cultural politics" often blamed for democratic instability is actually a struggle over the "symbolic exchange rate" of national belonging. By shifting the analytical focus from what citizens "think" to the "capital" they possess and the "distinction" they enact in everyday life, this research provides a holistic mechanism for understanding the persistence of social schisms in post-authoritarian societies. It suggests that contemporary democratic challenges are fundamentally rooted in the state’s power to determine which dispositions are rewarded by the system and which are marginalized as "un-legitimate." This framework offers a robust tool for scholars to discern how historical legacies and state-led narratives converge to shape the contemporary identity and actions of a polarized citizenry.