West European states than in East European countries (ibid. pp. 424, 425). These
results suggest two important conclusions: (1) it is not so much the kind of national
identity (ethnic, cultural, political) that matters for perceptions on immigrants and
foreigners, but the strength of national identities and sentiments; (2) Given its
stronger connection to xenophobia, national sentiment is a more dangerous
phenomenon in Western Europe than in the Eastern half of this continent.
Surprisingly, neither Hjerm nor the other authors who used the ISSP data set
correlated attitudes on immigrants to conceptions of nationhood. Combining
several databases and making use of multi-level analysis, Jones and Smith (2001b)
did relate the voluntarist and ascriptive dimensions of national identity to various
demographic characteristics and to macro-social properties such as a state’s degree
of globalization, its degree of post-industrialism, its degree of internal cultural
differentiation and its militarism. They found that all other things being equal the
higher a country’s degree of post-industrialism, the stronger the support of its
population for the voluntaristic dimension. However, they also found strong
individual effects, with immigrants, the higher educated and the well-to-do placing
more importance on the voluntaristic type than the native-born, the lower educated
and people with modest incomes.
Table 5 about here
To rectify the aforementioned omission, we used the ISSP database to correlate
Jones & Smith’s voluntarist and ascriptive dimensions to the composite construct
of xenophobia.12 Obviously, the expectation is that the voluntarist dimension and
xenophobia are negatively correlated - i.e. respondents who exhibit high scores on
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