of the common man, partly because of a lack of data. The 1995 ISSP survey,
however, which focused on national identity and attitudes towards immigrants,2
made it possible for the first time to examine to what extent the ethnic-civic
framework is reflected in popular notions of nationhood. To the knowledge of the
author so far four studies have used this source to explore the popular bases of
national identity. Jones and Smith (2001a; 2001b), the authors of two of these
studies, have investigated underlying dimensions in people’s minds. They based
their analysis on the following question in the survey:
Some people say the following things are important for being [e.g., truly British, Spanish,
Hungarian, etc.]. Others say they are not important. How important do you think each of the
following is....?’ 1 (very important), 2 (fairly important), 3 (not very important), or 4 (not
important at all).
• To have been born in [respondent’s country].
• To have citizenship in [respondent’s country].
• To have lived in [respondent’s country] for most of one’s life.
• To respect political institutions and laws of [respondent’s country].
• To feel [British, Spanish, Hungarian, etc.].
• To be able to speak [the dominant language in respondent’s country].
• To be a [believer in the dominant religion/denomination of respondent’s
county (e.g., Protestant, Christian, etc.)].
Using a rotated factor analysis they found that the answers to this question
clustered in two distinct dimensions, one capturing the items born, citizenship,
lived and religion and labelled „ascriptive/objectivist’ by the authors and another
correlating strongly with laws, feel and language which they labelled „subjectivist/-