Is Nationalism Rising in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic? Individual-Level Evidence from the United States
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Is Nationalism Rising in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic? Individual-Level Evidence from the United States Ruolin Su 1
& Wensong
Shen 2
Accepted: 8 September 2020/ # Journal of Chinese Political Science/Association of Chinese Political Studies 2020
Abstract Following the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, analysts have noted a global rise of nationalism as countries have engaged in a number of nationalist moves in response to the pandemic. However, the implication of policy changes at the individual-level remains unclear: do citizens support those nationalist government responses? More importantly, do people tend to be more nationalistic following the outbreak? Building on terror management theory (TMT), this article examines whether and how ideological beliefs affect individuals’ support for nationalist policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to TMT, to cope with death anxiety, people are predisposed to ideological defense, resulting in cohesion with individuals who validate their beliefs and hostility toward those who threaten them. Thus, we argue that when states’ nationalist policies are aligned with their ideology, people tend to support them; yet, when states’ nationalist policies contradict their ideology, people tend to withdraw their support. Specifically, this study found that as non-conservatives (compared to conservatives) are more concerned with the virus, they are more likely to show an inclination of ideological validation. Given that their ideology advocates more tolerance, nonconservatives are less likely to support nationalistic policies. To test the hypotheses, we applied structural equation modeling to a March 2020 CNN Poll (nationally representative US data about COVID-19). The statistical analysis demonstrated strong support for our arguments. Keywords The COVID-19 pandemic . Nationalism . Terror management theory .
Ideological defense . Political ideology
* Ruolin Su [email protected]
1
School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Xin Jian Building, 1954 Huashan Road, Shanghai 200030, China
2
Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
R. Su, W. Shen
Introduction As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage, countries have behaved in increasingly selfish ways: they shut down their borders, fight for medical supplies, and blame each other for the sources of the disease. The president of United States, Donald J. Trump, suspended entry of aliens who supposedly present a risk to the US labor market to protect American workers. Thus, a number of observers see a new epoch in the making, one in which nationalism tends to rise globally [1, 14, 23, 27, 51, 62–64, 66]. It is tempting to make inferences regarding the broader trends in the post-pandemic world based on those specific observations. However, it is possible that the observed increase in nationalism might prove to be temporary government responses to the pandemic, rather than reflect actual changes in the underlying attitudes or sentiments shared by people. P
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