Abstract
AbstractAs globalisation makes national boundaries both permeable and contested, conflicts over national identity and related policy issues are bound to increase the salience of citizens' individual national identitiesand, consequently, increase their impact on political attitudes and behaviour. We study the link between ethnocultural and civic dimensions of national identity and turnout and party preferences. After providing a theoretical discussion that integrates conceptions of national identity into established models of turnout and party preference formation, we explore the merit of accounting for these conceptions of national identity in a case study of Germany. Analysing data from two surveys conducted in the period between 2015 and 2017, we show that acceptance of civic criteria of national identity was positively associated with turnout and partisan support for all German parties besides the AfD. Acceptance of ethnocultural criteria was associated with increased support for (centre‐) right and decreased support for (centre‐) left parties. Some of these patterns differ significantly and in predictable ways between the two data points bracketing the height of the European refugee crisis. These findings suggest that individual conceptions of national identity may be of importance for our understanding turnout decisions and party preferences, but the specific relationships presumably depend on contextual conditions.
Highlights
After a decades-long eroding of national borders in the context of globalisation, this process is increasingly met with opposition in advanced Western societies
A civic understanding of national identity, on the other hand, is positively correlated with a preference for CDU/CSU and SPD and negatively correlated with favouring AfD or Left. Whereas these findings certainly are only one stone in what must become a mosaic of studies depicting the electoral relevance of national identity at the individual level, the present study suggests that national identity may be fruitfully utilised in electoral research, in particular when contestation of the concept is salient in the political discourse
A civic understanding of national identity is positively related to the probability of turning out both before and after the height of the refugee crisis, which is in line with the fact that the norm to vote is part of the civic conception, and there are multiple parties that champion a civic conception of national identity
Summary
After a decades-long eroding of national borders in the context of globalisation, this process is increasingly met with opposition in advanced Western societies. The results of our case study show that ethnocultural and civic conceptions of the nation are associated with electoral participation and party preferences in predictable ways. In both instances of party preference that we analyse, adherence to an ethnocultural national identity is associated with support for CDU/CSU and Alternative for Germany (AfD) and is negatively related to a preference for SPD, Greens and Left.
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