Nationalism and Democracy : A quantitative study about the relationship between national identity and attitudes towards democracy

This article sets out to examine how different levels and types of nationalism are correlated with attitudes towards democracy, a relationship that has not received much attention in previous research. I aim to investigate this relationship by examining how two forms of national identities (ethnic and civic) affect attitudes towards democracy in 30 European countries. Individual data comes from the European Social Survey (2008). The results indicate a significant and strong association between national identities and attitudes towards democracy. Individuals who articulate high levels of ethnic nationalism are less supportive of democracy than those who express high levels of civic nationalism. At country level, two variables are used: diversity and the extent to which democracy is established. Data that describes level of diversity comes from the Eurostat (2008) The index of democracy comes from Economist Intelligence Unit (2008). The structure of the dataset is hierarchical; therefore I have used multilevel models to avoid obtaining biased coefficients and standard errors. The study shows that higher levels of diversity and democracy, in general, amplify support for democracy, but, a high degree of diversity amplifies the negative relationship between ethnic nationalism and support of democracy and a high degree of democracy amplifies the positive relationship between ethnic nationalism and preferences for non-democratic rule