TY - JOUR

T1 - The relationship between patriotism and regional identification

T2 - a cross-country analysis

AU - Dirksmeier, Peter

N1 - Funding Information: I am very grateful to Lars Mewes for his challenging comments, which contributed a lot to the improvement of the paper. I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive, fair, and very purposeful reviews. And I would like to thank Janna Teltemann for her kind support with the statistical implementation.

PY - 2023/10

Y1 - 2023/10

N2 - Patriotism—as an ambivalent attitude towards the nation—has less exclusionary characteristics than nationalism and regional identification, because it does not require comparisons and hierarchies. What is less clear, however, is how to explain the positive evaluation of patriotism in the wider population. The article analyses the positive relationship of patriotism with nationalism and regional identification in 29 national and 421 regional contexts. The paper clearly shows that different factors explain the positive evaluation of patriotism and the mind-set of patriotism itself. While a nationalist attitude and regional identification at the individual level are strongly associated with a positive evaluation of patriotism and patriotism itself, institutionalised forms of regional autonomy are shown to be insignificant for the evaluation of patriotism and ambivalent for patriotism itself at the context level. The article concludes by discussing these results in the context of a Janus-faced nature of regional identification that can contribute to an inclusive society as much as to a nationalist-chauvinist attitude and which has so far been overlooked in regional science.

AB - Patriotism—as an ambivalent attitude towards the nation—has less exclusionary characteristics than nationalism and regional identification, because it does not require comparisons and hierarchies. What is less clear, however, is how to explain the positive evaluation of patriotism in the wider population. The article analyses the positive relationship of patriotism with nationalism and regional identification in 29 national and 421 regional contexts. The paper clearly shows that different factors explain the positive evaluation of patriotism and the mind-set of patriotism itself. While a nationalist attitude and regional identification at the individual level are strongly associated with a positive evaluation of patriotism and patriotism itself, institutionalised forms of regional autonomy are shown to be insignificant for the evaluation of patriotism and ambivalent for patriotism itself at the context level. The article concludes by discussing these results in the context of a Janus-faced nature of regional identification that can contribute to an inclusive society as much as to a nationalist-chauvinist attitude and which has so far been overlooked in regional science.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85136247671&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s00168-022-01167-1

DO - 10.1007/s00168-022-01167-1

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85136247671

VL - 71

SP - 343

EP - 362

JO - The annals of regional science

JF - The annals of regional science

SN - 0570-1864

IS - 2

ER -