Who Is a White Nationalist and Why? A Nationally Representative Survey

• In Event: Violence, Extremism, and White Identity

Abstract

In recent years coordinated white nationalist groups have become a more visibly violent force in American public life, representing a grave threat to the foundations of our multiracial and multicultural democracy. But efforts to combat white nationalism are hampered by a lack of knowledge about who identifies with this movement and the constellation of attitudes and beliefs that undergird white nationalist identity.

This paper will explore these questions with data from a first-ever survey on white nationalist identity and beliefs conducted with a nationally representative sample of whites in the U.S. It was fielded to 4,000 white Americans (including whites who identify as Hispanic or Latino) in November 2021 via the internet by YouGov as part of the Cooperative Election Study (CES), and approved by our university's Committee on Human Subjects. We anticipate the survey data will be released to us by February 2022.

The survey includes batteries of questions the strength of white identity and the need for coordinated political action to advance the interest of whites (as developed by Jardina 2019), the extent to which respondents view non-white and non-Christian groups as having too much power (adapted from Forscher & Kteily 2020), endorsement of actions by whites that threaten and harass non-white leaders and citizens and support for the perpetration of violence to advance white political goals (adapted from Kalmoe & Mason 2020).

The focus of our study will be responses to an explicit yes-or-no item about white nationalist identity we developed specifically for our survey. Because we anticipated that many Americans are unfamiliar with what "white nationalism" means, we built an experiment into the study. Half of white participants first read a short description of central tenets of white nationalist beliefs about demography, power, and culture and then were asked "Are you a supporter of the white nationalist movement?" The other half were first asked this question, their responses recorded, and then asked the question again after reading the short description. The experiment thus allows us to ascertain who is already familiar with this term, and who changes their affiliation upon learning what it means.

Along with the comprehensive suite of demographic, political and other measures in the CES, these survey items will make possible a first-ever in-depth portrait of the prevalence of white nationalist identity and beliefs in the U.S. It will enable us to see how support for white nationalism varies along the lines of gender, age, ethnicity, education, occupation, class, and political knowledge and engagement, as well as partisanship and ideology. It will also allow us to pinpoint which attitudes and beliefs - including out-group antipathy, in-group affinity, and the sense of threat to the white population - are associated most strongly with white nationalist identity.

We also ask questions about recent events in respondents' lives--such as losing a job, health and relationship problems, and the death of a loved one--that are hypothesized to make people more vulnerable to the rhetoric of grievance promulgated by white nationalists. In addition, a special focus of the study will be the extent to which white nationalist sympathies are correlated with online activity. White nationalist organizers have relied heavily on social media and the internet to recruit, cultivate and mobilize adherents, and our study includes a battery of questions about social media usage, including whether respondents have accounts on networks favored by members and leaders of the "alt-right," such as Parler, Gab and Telegram. It also includes questions designed to ascertain whether respondents' most important social contacts are primarily online or offline.

Finally, the large sample size of our study and the detailed geographic and demographic information provided by the CES on its respondents, will permit us to use multiple regression and post-stratification (MRP) to generate relatively precise estimates of the prevalence of white nationalist sentiment among white Americans at the state level, and likely at the county level. These geocodes will also allow us to see the extent to which local context - such as recent local shifts in economic, demographic and health conditions - are associated with prevalence of white nationalist identification.

References:

Forscher, Patrick S. and Nour S. Kteily. 2020. "A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right." /Perspectives on Psychological Science/ 15(1): 90-116.

Jardina, Ashley. 2019. /White Identity Politics./ Cambridge University Press.

Kalmoe, Nathan P. and Lilliana Mason. 2020. "Most Americans Reject Partisan Violence, But There Is Still Cause for Concern." Voter Study Group, May 7. https://www.voterstudygroup.org/blog/has-american-partisanship-gone-too-far (accessed Jan. 18 2022).

Authors

• Patrick J. Egan, New York University

• James Hodgdon Bisbee, NYU

• Jonathan Nagler, New York University

• Joshua A. Tucker, New York University