Timeless Landscape or Diverse Urbanity: Nationhood in the US and England

• In Event: The Importance of Place and Identity in Public Opinion & Political Behavior

Abstract

Questions of national identity and exclusion are closely bound up with the contemporary rise of national populism. Can national identity be summed up by simple dichotomies such as ethnic/civic, exclusive/inclusive or 'true' versus paper membership?

We use new data to argue for a more granular approach which argues that there is no single or dichotomous national identity, but rather a variety of national identities within the same country, whose content differs between white majorities and minorities, liberals and conservatives, and other social categories.

Our paper will investigate how the content of American and British national identity varies according to the group lens (Kaufmann 2008) of the beholder – particularly ethnicity and ideology.

While a great deal of work has examined criteria for distinguishing those high or low in nationalism, ‘true’ Americans from others, or the ‘ethnic-civic’ dimension of national identity (i.e. Schildkraut 2007, Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016), we know far less about the affective aspect of nationalism. That is, how the symbolic composition of national affections varies by ethnicity, partisanship and other criteria. We surmise that whites and nonwhites, progressives and conservatives, possess national identity but are attracted to different myth-symbol complexes (Smith 1991).

That is, rather than deriving a set of factors from questions focusing on membership criteria, we seek to evaluate affective attachment to features of the nation in an attempt to discern which items people are most attached to.

In the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) as well as an MTurk sample and a recent BBC/YouGov survey, respondents were asked to rate how a range of factors were related to their perceptions of American and English identity. The American samples included the American countryside, diverse racial-ethnic groups, national parks, the armed forces, cowboys, immigrants, history, alternative neighborhoods, and various sports leagues. The BBC/YouGov survey asked respondents which of the following contributed to their sense of English identity: the countryside, Christianity, diversity, poetry, sports, music, and history. We use this data to shed light on our theory that responses about the content of national identity will change depending on the lens of the beholder.

According to Kaufmann’s (2008) optical theory of national identity, territory and people are resources, the ‘light’ from which is refracted through the interpretive ‘lens’ of ideology and interests.

Ideological, ethnic, partisan and other positional lenses concentrate individual minds on specific symbols, which create their unique portrait of the nation.

Such an approach allows scholars to gain a more complex understanding of the nature of contemporary nationalism. It has implications for the concept of a ‘hidden’ ethnic white majority that is revealed by which aspects of national identity whites (conservatives in particular) are attached to.

In the UK, for example, whites in the aggregate are more likely than minorities to identify England’s landscape and history as symbols of their English national identity. A more fine-grained statistical analysis of the characteristics which are associated with specific symbols, an extension of the findings to the American case, and the use of an England-American comparison, form the basis of this paper’s contribution to knowledge.

References

Bonikowski, B. and P. DiMaggio (2016). "Varieties of American Popular Nationalism." American Sociological Review 82(5).
Kaufmann, E. (2008). "The Lenses of Nationhood: An Optical Model of Identity." Nations & Nationalism 14(3): 449-477.
Schildkraut, D. J. (2007). "Defining American Identity in the Twenty‐First Century: How Much “There” is There?" Journal of Politics 69(3): 597-615.
Smith, A. (1991). National Identity. London, Penguin.

Authors

• Eric P. Kaufmann, Birkbeck College, University of London

• David L. Leal, University of Texas at Austin