Shared Representations of the Nation in Thirty Countries: An Inductive Approach to Cross-National Attitudinal Research.

This study develops a novel analytical approach for studying cross-national variation in popular conceptions of the nation, which takes seriously both within- and between-country heterogeneity and does not rely on reductive a priori assumptions about the national boundedness of attitudes. By using inductive quantitative methods to analyze pooled cross-national survey data from the International Social Survey Programme, I identify common patterns of nationalist attitudes among all respondents from thirty countries and only subsequently examine those respondents' national affiliations, along with a variety of other individual attributes. Having mapped the heterogeneity of popular conceptions of the nation within each country, I ask how those understandings and their cross-national distribution have changed between 1995 and 2003. Finally, in an attempt to explain these attitudinal shifts, I employ qualitative case analysis to examine the political, economic, and demographic changes that took place within the countries during this time period. The results of the study reveal four fundamental characteristics of contemporary popular nationalism in wealthy democratic countries: 1) Popular nationalism is far more heterogeneous than is suggested by existing theories; 2) All varieties of nationalism are present in all countries, though their relative prevalence varies across countries; 3) The content of shared representations of the nation is remarkably stable over time; and 4) The distribution of the shared representations across countries changes over time. The results of this paper make an important contribution to the nationalism literature and provide a blueprint for a more nuanced comparative approach to the study of political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]