Diversity and commonality in national identities: an exploratory analysis of cross-national patterns

Issues of boundary maintenance are implicit in all studies of national iden tity. By definition, national communities consist of those who are included but surrounded (literally or metaphorically) by those who are excluded. Mo st extant research on national identity explores criteria for national memb ership largely in terms of official or public definitions described, for ex ample, in citizenship and immigration laws or in texts of popular culture. We know much less about how ordinary people in various nations reason about these issues. An analysis of cross-national (N = 23) survey data from the 1995 International Social Science Program reveals a core pattern in most of the countries studied. Respondents were asked how important various criter ia were in being 'truly' a member of a particular nation. Exploratory facto r analysis shows that these items cluster in terms of two underlying dimens ions. Ascriptive/objectivist criteria relating to birth, religion and resid ence can be distinguished from civic/voluntarist criteria relating to subje ctive feelings of membership and belief in core institutions. In most natio ns the ascriptive/objectivist dimension of national identity was more promi nent than the subjective civic/voluntarist dimension. Taken overall, these findings suggest an unanticipated homogeneity in the ways that citizens aro und the world think about national identity. To the extent that these dimen sions also mirror the well-known distinction between ethnic and civic natio nal identification, they suggest that the former remains robust despite glo balization, mass migration and cultural pluralism. Throughout the world off icial definitions of national identification have tended to shift towards a civic model. Yet citizens remain remarkably traditional in outlook. A task for future research is to investigate the macrosociological forces that pr oduce both commonality and difference in the core patterns we have identifi ed.