Maps to Die For?

• In Event: The Microdynamics of Border Control

Abstract

Citizens sacrifice, fight, and die in battle to protect the homeland. Why citizens would take such monumental risks is not obvious. Explanations normally center on the role of nationalism, yet the microfoundations that link nationalism and willingness to sacrifice for the homeland have been undertheorized and have faced few if any rigorous empirical tests. In line with the canonical account of nationalism by Anderson (1991), we argue that maps help motivate such sacrifices, motivating beliefs and attitudes regarding the proper definition of the homeland and helping to coordinate expectations about the extent of group membership by specifying a territory that requires a common defense. Citizens come to know and understand the boundaries of the homeland through maps taught in school classrooms, absorbing its geography from school atlases and geography textbooks, thereby promoting national identity and a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the group. We conduct surveys with embedded experiments in Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia that manipulate the presentation of maps of these four countries to determine whether the visual representation of respondents’ homelands affects their national-identity attitudes, increasing their willingness to personally sacrifice more on behalf of their homelands.

Authors

• Henk Erich Goemans, University of Rochester

• Michael Lee Weintraub, Universidad de los Andes

• Andi Cam Zhou, Harvard University