Nationalism and Democracy

• In Event: Political Attitudes and Citizenship in Greater China

Abstract

To make democracy work, citizens have to vote. One well-established explanation for why citizens vote in the literature is civic duty. Yet, it remains unclear how citizens develop such duty to vote so that democracy can work. In this paper, we argue that the duty to vote is rooted in country-specific nationalism that motivates citizens to vote for the imagined political community. We back up our argument with original empirical evidence form a public opinion survey of 979 adult Taiwanese respondents fielded in the December of 2023. We first show that the latent Taiwan nationalism constructed by the Item Response Theory method is empirically valid. Then, we further show that such latent Taiwan nationalism is conductive to the duty to vote. We finally show that the average marginal effect of this latent Taiwan nationalism on the duty to vote is much stronger among the subgroup of respondents identified with the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Overall, our results suggest that country-specific nationalism is not necessarily detrimental to democracy as often presumed, and that it constitutes a base for political parties to cultivate nationalist votes for electoral victory.

Authors

• Jason Kuo, National Taiwan University

• Shao Gu Lu, Carnegie Mellon University

• Ta-Pang Cheng, Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University