Does status influence national pride? Testing a social psychological model of national identification

Abstract Does international status influence peoples’ feelings about the state? While recent scholarship suggests that status is valuable in part because it strengthens national pride among citizens, skeptics point out that the public is generally inattentive to foreign policy, and unlikely to care much about the state’s position in the world. This paper draws on social psychological theory to argue that changes in international status do influence affective national identification. I use cross-national and US-based observational survey data, as well as two original survey experiments, to demonstrate that changes in status and national pride are positively associated and plausibly causally related. I also show that this relationship has potentially significant consequences for understanding the role of international status in contributing to variation in state strength and cohesion.