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A neglected topic in empirical research on national identity is its stability at the individual level, and this is especially true for its content, that is, the meaning elements that people associate with the concept of nation. In this article, we study the stability of key dimensions of national‐identity content. We ask three simple questions: How stable is national‐identity content—as captured in the ethnic/civic framework—at the level of individual citizens? Are there clear differences in stability across subgroups? What are the implications of interindividual differences in stability? Analyzing data from four waves of a large‐scale panel survey of German citizens (N = 4,654) collected over a five‐year period (2016–21), we show that there is high but not perfect stability of the degree to which individuals subscribe to ethnic and civic criteria of nationhood. Second, we find little difference in stability as a function of several theoretically selected characteristics. Third, we show that the association between national‐identity content and relevant political attitudes (immigration attitudes and far‐right party support) increases with intraindividual stability. These findings have important implications for our understanding of how national‐identity content is shaped and mobilized and how it can influence political attitudes and behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As globalisation makes national boundaries both permeable and contested, conflicts over national identity and related policy issues are bound to increase the salience of citizens' individual national identitiesand, consequently, increase their impact on political attitudes and behaviour. We study the link between ethnocultural and civic dimensions of national identity and turnout and party preferences. After providing a theoretical discussion that integrates conceptions of national identity into established models of turnout and party preference formation, we explore the merit of accounting for these conceptions of national identity in a case study of Germany. Analysing data from two surveys conducted in the period between 2015 and 2017, we show that acceptance of civic criteria of national identity was positively associated with turnout and partisan support for all German parties besides the AfD. Acceptance of ethnocultural criteria was associated with increased support for (centre‐) right and decreased support for (centre‐) left parties. Some of these patterns differ significantly and in predictable ways between the two data points bracketing the height of the European refugee crisis. These findings suggest that individual conceptions of national identity may be of importance for our understanding turnout decisions and party preferences, but the specific relationships presumably depend on contextual conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies describe how globalisation—the global integration of the economic, political, and cultural domains of society—transforms party competition in Western Europe. At the citizen level, however, our knowledge about globalisation attitudes and their electoral consequences remains limited. Using data from a large-scale panel survey of the German public, we show that, first, citizens hold stable rather than fluid attitudes towards the concept of globalisation. Second, these attitudes are rather closely related to positions on specific economic, cultural, and political issues that social scientists understand as facets of globalisation but unrelated to positions on traditional redistribution issues. Third, attitudes towards globalisation are systematically associated with voting decisions even when controlling for specific issue attitudes. We conclude that individuals hold integrated belief systems concerning globalisation and that globalisation matters as a contentious political symbol. We discuss the implications of these findings for the politics of globalisation in Germany and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies show that globalisation creates political potentials that can transform electoral competition in Western societies. The specific process of how these potentials become effective is not completely understood. It is argued in the article that attention-grabbing events can trigger the transformation of electoral competition as they force actors to take clear positions and thereby allow citizens to align their partisan preferences and policy attitudes. The article analyses the case of German parties’ reaction to the arrival of large numbers of refugees at Europe’s borders in 2015/16. Using panel data that bracket this event, it is shown how German citizens responded to party behaviour by changing partisan preferences on the basis of prior immigration attitudes. The so-called refugee crisis may thus have been a critical juncture transforming party competition in Germany. As such, the crisis represents a striking example of how events may focus attention on a new policy dimension and catalyse the evolution of new cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the role of perceived policy objectives in German citizens' attitude formation toward military action in Afghanistan. While some scholars have claimed that public opinion is prudent because citizens assess the effectiveness of a mission on the basis of these perceptions, micro-level tests of this kind of prudence remain scare. Drawing on two cross-sectional surveys of the German population conducted in 2008 and 2009, we use responses to open-ended questions about the German government's policy goals in Afghanistan to analyze whether such perceptions influenced support and whether any such influence was mediated via the perceived effectiveness of the mission. The results indicate that, irrespective of the level of political awareness, it was virtually irrelevant what German citizens perceived the military mission's objectives to be. In contrast, value-based attitude formation emerges as more important, with the foreign policy predispositions antimilitarism and Atlanticism exhibiting especially large effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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