Multilevel Territorial Attachment, Globalization, and the City

• In Event: Politics of Place and Space

Abstract

One of the least understood dimensions of territorial relations in advanced industrial democracies has been their relationship to the identity of ordinary citizens. This paper sets out and tests a framework for understanding an especially understudied empirical dimension of this relationship, the subjective attachment of citizens to the multiple scales of territorial collectivities, from the local to the global. The wave of globalization that followed the Cold War gave rise to contradictory theories about the relative attachment of citizens to collectivities at the local, regional, national scales. Globalization has been identified with denationalization, with deterritorialization, or with ‘glocalized” attachment to both local and transnational collectivities. Accounts of the sources of populism often point to a general sense of marginality in regions left behind by globalizing trends. Other authors identify a general rise in subnational identities over the same period. This paper tests how globalization and urbanization influenced several compound measures of territorial attachment that reflect these theories. The analysis employs the ISSP National Identity Module from 1995, 2003, and 2013 in a total of 31 countries, along with geocoded regional data. We find that regional exposure to globalization has not fostered deterritorialization in the regions that globalization has benefited the most, but has reinforced national attachment there. Although urban residents manifest stronger “glocal” attachment regardless of region, citizens of globalizing, urbanized regions generally report greater closeness to their nation as well as to their region. In less advantaged regions, globalization has generally led to greater disengagement from national politics. These results establish clear links between the unevenness of post-Cold War globalization and the emerging contemporary political divides across the developed world.

Authors

• Jefferey M. Sellers, University of Southern California

• Yue Li, University of Southern California

• Chloe Bernadaux, University of Southern California