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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-cos-10.1177_00207152221115631 for Contrasting perspectives: Belief in national superiority in relation to countries’ performance by Marharyta Fabrykant and Vladimir Magun in International Journal of Comparative Sociology

The article examines a key attribute of Russian national identity—national pride—as it is reflected in mass consciousness. To trace the dynamics of multiple facets of national pride and related phenomena from 1996 to 2015, we use data from five surveys. The results demonstrate a substantial growth in Russian national pride in specific country achievements and general pride in Russian citizenship over the last 20 years. This change is the result of the population’s and state’s need for positive social identity as well as from both real and imagined progress in the Russian economy and political influence, and it started long before the Crimea mobilization and Olympics of 2014. The structural difference in pride in various achievements persisted for the 20 years examined here, but became less distinct. Across the years examined here, Russian national pride has become more strongly related to belief in the superiority of the country and is therefore increasingly competitive.

Supplemental material, Online_supplementary_Tables for Relations Among Higher Order Values Around the World by Maksim Rudnev, Vladimir Magun and Shalom H. Schwartz in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

The objective of this paper is to describe cross-country similarities and differences in national pride and to explain national pride variations on the individual and country levels. The analysis in this paper is applied to different measures of national pride, with some of them being relatively complex cognitively and the others more elementary. The paper presents the results of cross-country comparison of national pride based on empirical evidence from the ISSP-2003 database which included data from 45993 respondents from 36 countries and regions. The survey participants estimated their overall level of national pride by responding to the direct one-item question and, separately, they estimated pride of each of ten specific achievements of their countries in various domains. Factor analysis of these ten items yielded two dimensions of domain-based national pride, one of them being the factor of general pride of various country achievements and the other reflects the inverse relations between the prides of elitist and mass achievements of the nation. The multilevel regression models estimated for the three indicators of national pride confirm the feasibility of dividing these indicators into cognitively processed and normatively imposed national pride. Cognitively processed national pride measured by the domain-based estimates have been affected by objective country achievements and by the level of standards which the achievements are compared against. The normatively imposed national pride measured by direct one-item question has been influenced by the country level of religiosity that indicates the individual willingness to accept normative messages from the state uncritically. Rational national pride requires some objective grounds to believe in a nation’s perfection, and normative national pride is not so strongly related to objective achievements and therefore can be more easily manipulated. The practical implication of this difference stems from the fact that in their search for objectively grounded national pride people would be eager to foster country achievements and their maintenance of normatively imposed pride requires in many cases just reliably protected wishful thinking

The authors use mainly data from the European Social Survey carried out in 2008 to compare Russian basic values and the values of the thirty-one other European countries as measured by the Schwartz Portrait Values Questionnaire.

Unlike variable-centered measures, validity and stability of typologies have been rarely studied. Magun, Rudnev and Schmidt [in review] developed a value typology of the European population using data from the 4th round of the European Social Survey. The value classes showed heuristic power in the comparison of different parts of the European population, countries in particular, enabling more differentiated interpretations in a parsimonious way. The current paper tests the stability of this typology by extending the study to three time points – consecutive surveys in 2008, 2010 and 2012. Conceptually, this test coincides with measurement invariance testing. We reviewed the levels of typology measurement invariance. Then, the invariance of the value typology of Europeans was tested across three rounds of the ESS and it was found to hold configural and partial invariance. The reliability of the value classes was supported by the stability of country class probabilities across the time points as well. The correlations of the country shares of the value classes with the economic development of countries are also invariant at the three time points. The results imply that the value classification of Europeans is not ad hoc, but reflects the natural structure of European societies, and can be used in future studies.

In order to combine a study of within-country value diversity and cross-country differences, we applied a person-centered approach. Instead of focusing on the distinct value items, respondents from the 33 European countries were classified on the basis of the whole set of Schwartz value items (Portrait Values Questionnaire) by means of Latent Class Analysis. Six Pan-European value classes were found; they differ both by rank of values and degree of value preferences. Surprisingly, a class with the least pronounced value preferences appeared to be the largest one (38%). In each country all six value classes are represented. Nordic and Western European countries have more uniform distributions of value class shares than Post-Communist and Mediterranean countries; this is suggested to be an implication of societal developmental processes which start from the few people who commit themselves to the values of more advanced countries.