Status Dissatisfaction and Diasporic Nationalism among Immigrants

• In Event: Poster Session: Intergroup Dynamics and Tolerance & Representation and Electoral Systems
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Intergroup Dynamics and Tolerance

Abstract

With the formation of diaspora groups in nation-states due to increased migration and the advent of new technologies that facilitate cross-border communications, the enactments of nationalism have taken on transnational and extraterritorial configurations. However, much of the existing literature in Political Science on the psychology of national identification has focused on domestic and “territorialized” nationalism (e.g., Shayo 2009; Weiss 2014; Charnysh et al. 2015; Wimmer 2019). By contrast, this paper theorizes and examines diasporic nationalism as a timely and important variety of nationalism. Using an original survey experiment involving the Chinese diaspora in the United States as an illustrative case study, this paper accomplishes two tasks: First, it presents one of the first large-N datasets on the multiple correlates and dimensions of diasporic nationalism. Second, it presents and tests a novel theory about status dissatisfaction to make sense of the observed empirics, as well as the causal psychological mechanism that incentivizes an immigrant to hold diasporic national identification. The paper presents survey evidence in favor of status dissatisfaction in the host country, which paradoxically occurs more often in wealthier immigrants, as a compelling incentive for diasporic homeland identification among immigrants across three dimensions: cultural, financial, and ethnic. The paper’s theory and data contradict the conventional wisdom held by existing studies on (domestic) national identification, which emphasizes economic deprivation and insecurity as the key explanatory variable for support for nationalism (e.g., Bonikowski 2016, Gidron and Hall 2017, Scheiring 2020). The findings of the paper speak to a few important strands of scholarship: political psychology, race and migration, and nationalism and transnationalism.

Author

• Lucy Song, Harvard University