How Nation Building Backfires: The Role of Beliefs about Group Malleability

• In Event: Attitudes in Conflict Settings

Abstract

From episodic large-scale violence between ethnic groups to mundane tensions between urban dwellers and rural migrants, subnational conflicts have created a fundamental challenge to the stability of modern states. To homogenize the population, political elites have leveraged their control of the education system, media, and cultural institutions to disseminate a unified identity among subnational groups. Surprisingly, empirical studies have found that such policies are often associated with more, not less, subnational conflicts.

Based on data collected in Hong Kong, an epicenter of subnational conflicts in China, this paper suggests that nation building may intensify the tension between subnational groups because it helps to spread the belief that groups have fixed inherent characteristics. Specifically, in the face of deep intergroup cultural and political differences, people who see their nation as a historically unified entity are more likely to believe that those differences are unchangeable and, in turn, develop negative attitudes toward other subnational groups.

We support these arguments with a representative survey of the population (N=1032) and two laboratory experiments (N=200 each). The survey finds that beliefs about group malleability is negatively associated with perceived national homogeneity (-0.19, p < 0.001), a proxy of exposure to nation building, and positively with attitudes towards migrants coming from other parts of China (0.30, p < 0.001). Our mediation analysis confirms that implicit belief exerts an indirect effect (–0.01, p < 0.01) on the relationship between nation building and immigration attitudes.

These relationships are at least partly causal. In the first experiment, respondents who are exposed to narratives that emphasize the homogeneity of the Chinese nation report a higher level of fixed group perceptions than those who receive the opposite message (t = 5.01; p < 0.001). In the second experiment, respondents who are primed to believe that group characteristics are fixed report significantly more negative attitudes toward migrants from other parts of China (t = 3.04, p < 0.001).

Although the aforementioned relationships may seem intuitive, this is the first time that the conflict-inducing process of nation building has been explicitly established in the literature. In contrast to the dichotomy that some widely cited studies have drawn between nation building and disintegrative mobilization, our findings demonstrate that there is a conflict-inducing process embedded in the positive or non-significant cohesion-building effect of nation building. This previously unexplored mechanism explains, on the one hand, why past research that focuses on the total effects of nation building has generally endorsed the effectiveness of nation building. On the other hand, by affirming the critical role of implicit beliefs in shaping the effects of nation building, it directs future studies to look beyond the usual outcome variables concerning national feelings and to examine a wider array of psychological mechanisms.

Author

• Siu Yau Lee, The Education University of Hong Kong