Popular Conceptions of Nationhood in Old and New European

Respondents were asked to express their level of agreement with each of the items
on a scale with the values of 1 (strongly agree), 2 (tend to agree), 3 (tend to
disagree), 4 (strongly disagree).

It must be noted that the question on national identity in the Eurobarometer
survey was worded quite differently from the one in the ISSP survey. Whereas the
latter asked respondents to evaluate the importance of certain personal
characteristics for making some one a true [nationality, e.g. Dutchman], the former
asked them to state the importance of certain characteristics buttressing one’s own
sense of national belonging. The ISSP survey therefore taps much more directly
into the issue of open or closed membership of the nation and therefore into Jones
& Smith’s voluntarist-ascriptive dichotomy (or Zimmer’s boundary mechanisms)
than the Eurobarometer. It could be argued that because of its specific wording the
latter relates almost exclusively to properties underpinning national identity
(political, societal, cultural, historical, state-symbolic, i.e. the symbolic resources in
Zimmer’s terms). In other words, the Eurobarometer data primarily cover the
qualitative nature of national identities rather than inclusive or excluding notions of
nationhood.

A rotated factor analysis performed on the Eurobarometer data revealed that the
aforementioned items grouped into five dimensions (see Table 1 which presents
data of the ten countries grouped together⁵). The first dimension, which is the most
powerful in terms of variance explained, could be labelled „patriotic’ as it clusters
the items national pride, independence, national character, symbols, and to a lesser
extent borders. It is more interesting however to examine dimensions two, three
and four since the items they cover relate to the ethnic-civic framework. As we can
see, dimension two neatly groups items referring to the political and social system,

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