Recognizing What Is (Not) Shared: National Identity Primes Fail to Reduce Polarization in Six Western Democracies

The idea that polarized camps can be united through a shared national identity is popular among politicians, pundits, and researchers. At least in the US, however, recent evidence suggests that there are no shared values, lifestyles, or hardships that could reliably prompt a meaningful, non-partisan national identity. To evaluate whether national identities can bridge divides elsewhere, we apply Levendusky’s (2018) prominent prime––the last one shown to be effective––to other countries with different degrees of polarization. Experiments on nationally representative samples from six Western democracies show that adaptations of this prime are similarly ineffective elsewhere. This evidence implies that partisan reasoning is so dominant that it overrules attempts to evoke national sharedness. Moreover, that conservatives often hold an ethnic conception of national identity, whereas liberals tend to be skeptical about national identity in general, indicates the need for an identity that citizens plausibly can and want to share.