Social, psychological and ideological roots of nationalist attitudes in Serbia

Individual differences in nationalist attitudes have been approached from a variety of perspectives. In the sociological tradition, nationalist attitudes are seen as specific for certain socio-demographic categories, typically those indicative of socio-economic and cultural deprivation. Psychological literature typically places stronger emphasis on dispositional constructs. Researchers studying the structure of social attitudes emphasize the importance of general ideological orientations. This paper examines to what extent the aforementioned approaches contribute to understanding nationalist attitudes in Serbia. The research is based on a random sample of adult residents of Belgrade. According to hierarchical regression analysis results, the sociodemographic variables explain about 19 percent of variance in nationalist attitudes. The model improves significantly when the dispositional variables are added (explaining 44 percent of variance in total), as well as the ideological variables (68 percent of variance in total). The results showed that ideological variables are proximal factors that mediate the influence of psychological dispositions and social factors. Authoritarianism proved to be the key dispositional variable. The paper concludes that a more complex model is superior in comparison with simpler models, limited by disciplinary conventions