Affiliation:
1. Department of Survey Data Curation GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences Cologne Germany
2. Department of Sociology and Anthropology Tel‐Aviv University Tel‐Aviv Israel
3. Department of Sociology Goethe University Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main Germany
Abstract
AbstractWhile exclusionary national identities are widespread among Europeans, relatively few people vote for the far right in most countries. Thus, an exclusionary identity in many cases does not lead to voting for the most nativist types of parties. We explain this empirical puzzle by showing that these identities need to be activated to become behaviourally relevant. To this end, we analyse longitudinal comparative data of over 135,000 individuals across more than 26 years and 26 countries combining different survey programmes and manifesto data. We use latent class analysis to show that over half of respondents hold exclusionary conceptions of nationhood. Moreover, this type of national identity predicts voting far right. Using multi‐level modelling and within‐country estimators, we further demonstrate that this relationship is significantly stronger when a country's political elites across all parties become more exclusionary. Taking the activation hypothesis to the test in a European context, we conclude that the effect of national identity is conditional on its prior activation.
Funder
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Subject
Political Science and International Relations,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Geography, Planning and Development,General Medicine