Bart Bonikowski

News

New publication: “Moralizing Immigration: Political Framing, Moral Conviction, and Polarization in the United States and Denmark”

by

New article (co-authored with Kristina Simonsen) on moral conviction and anti-immigrant attitudes, available online at Comparative Political Studies. Here is the abstract:

Morally charged rhetoric is commonplace in political discourse on immigration but scholars have not examined how it affects divisions over the issue among the public. To address this gap, we employ preregistered survey experiments in two countries where anti-immigration rhetoric has been prominent: the United States and Denmark. We demonstrate that exposure to moralized messages leads respondents to place greater moral weight on their existing immigration opinions and become more averse to political leaders and, in the United States, social interaction partners who espouse opposite beliefs. This suggests that political moralization contributes to moral conflict and affective polarization. We find no evidence, however, that moral framing produces attitudinal polarization—that is, more extreme immigration opinions. Our study helps make sense of the heightened intensity of anti-immigrant politics even when attitudes are stable. It also suggests a promising avenue for comparative research on affective polarization by shifting the focus from partisanship to the moralization of existing issue disagreements.

New publication: “Mapping Culture with Latent Class Analysis: A Response to Eger and Hjerm.”

by

New article (co-authored with Paul DiMaggio) on the use of latent class analysis for measuring cultural schemas, available online at Nations and Nationalism. Here is the abstract:

Eger and Hjerm’s methodological critique of our 2016 study of Americans’ sentiments towards the nation asserts that the latent class (LCA) models employed in our paper did not fit the data and that consequently, the paper fails to demonstrate the existence of multiple varieties of American nationalism. We challenge E&H’s analyses and argue that their conclusions stem from erroneous assumptions, both about our models and about best practices for applied LCA-based research. Based on a review of their results and additional analyses carried out with their preferred measures, we demonstrate that our model choices were justified and our 2016 findings are robust. In so doing, we offer a critique of unreflective adherence to inappropriate model fit criteria that ignores theory and concerns over the parsimony, interpretability, construct validity and external validity of model results.

New publication: “The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’: How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election”

by

New article on nationalism and the 2016 primary and general presidential elections, available online at the American Journal of Sociology. Here is the abstract:

Political scientists have acknowledged the importance of nationalism as a constitutive element of radical-right politics but have typically empirically reduced the phenomenon to specific out-group sentiments. Sociologists, in contrast, have devoted more attention to theorizing and operationalizing nationalism but have only sporadically engaged in debates about institutional politics. The present study brings these literatures together by considering how nationalist beliefs shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalism in the U.S. population. The results suggest that competing understandings of American nationhood were effectively mobilized by candidates from the two parties, in both the 2016 primaries and the general election. Furthermore, over the past 20 years, nationalism has become sorted by party, as Republican identifiers have come to define America in more exclusionary and critical terms and Democrats have increasingly endorsed inclusive and positive conceptions of nationhood. These trends point to the rising demand for radical candidates among Republicans and suggest a potentially bleak future for U.S. politics, as nationalism becomes yet another among multiple overlapping social and cultural cleavages that serve to reinforce partisan divisions and undermine the stability of liberal democratic institutions.

New publication: “Populist and Nativist Attitudes: Does Ingroup-Outgroup Thinking Spill over Across Domains?”

by

New article (co-authored with Matthijs Rooduijn and Jante Parlevliet) on the spillover between populism and nativism (and vice versa), available online at the European Union Politics. Here is the abstract:

What are the attitudinal consequences of the growing pervasiveness of populism and nativism? We conceive of both populism and nativism as binary moral frameworks predicated on an antagonistic relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Our study investigates the presence of spillover effects between these two forms of ingroup/outgroup thinking among survey respondents in the Netherlands. We posit that exposure to populist (nativist) messages fuels nativism (populism), but only among those positively predisposed toward these messages in the first place. A first survey experiment, focusing on antipathies toward refugees and Muslim immigrants, confirms the former expectation, but a second experiment calls into question the latter hypothesis. Moreover, the second experiment does not replicate the effects of populist message exposure on general immigration attitudes. We discuss several possible reasons for these mixed results.

New publication: “Nationalist Narratives and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes: Exceptionalism and Collective Victimhood in Contemporary Israel.”

by

New article (co-authored with Yuval Feinstein) on nationalist beliefs and anti-immigrant attitudes in Israel, out in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (link to full text). Here is the abstract:

While scholars have long studied the relationship between nationalist beliefs and anti-immigrant attitudes, such work has proceeded largely independently from research on collective memory, which explores how nationalist narratives are created, maintained, and contested. In this paper, we bring these literatures together by asking how, at the individual level, receptivity to salient narratives about the nation’s past is associated with dispositions toward immigrants and immigration policy. Specifically, we focus on two narratives common in a number of contemporary democracies that frame the nation as having been perpetually victimised over its history (i.e. the victimhood narrative) and as having been chosen to carry out a special mission in the world (i.e. the exceptionalism narrative). Using original data from Israel, we demonstrate that stronger agreement with these narratives, and particularly with exceptionalism, is associated with greater propensity to hold anti-immigrant views. Our analyses reveal that this relationship is mediated by ethnic conceptions of the nation’s symbolic boundaries and, to a lesser degree, by perceived symbolic and material threats to the nationstate. Building on recent comparative work, we argue that in nations with a history of precarious sovereignty, victimhood and exceptionalism narratives can provide a fertile basis for the exclusionary appeals of radical-right political actors.

New Publication: “Is Civic Nationalism Necessarily Inclusive? Conceptions of Nationhood and Anti‐Muslim Attitudes in Europe.”

by

New article (co-authored with Kristina Simonsen) on the negative effects of civic nationalism on anti-Muslim attitudes in Northwestern Europe, out in the European Journal is Political Research (link to full text). Here is the abstract:

Despite the centrality of national identity in the exclusionary discourse of the European radical right, scholars have not investigated how popular definitions of nationhood are connected to dispositions toward Muslims. Moreover, survey‐based studies tend to conflate anti‐Muslim attitudes with general anti‐immigrant sentiments. This article contributes to research on nationalism and out‐group attitudes by demonstrating that varieties of national self‐understanding are predictive of anti‐Muslim attitudes, above and beyond dispositions toward immigrants. Using latent class analysis and regression models of survey data from 41 European countries, it demonstrates that conceptions of nationhood are heterogeneous within countries and that their relationship with anti‐Muslim attitudes is contextually variable. Consistent with expectations, in most countries, anti‐Muslim attitudes are positively associated with ascriptive – and negatively associated with elective (including civic) – conceptions of nationhood. Northwestern Europe, however, is an exception to this pattern: in this region, civic nationalism is linked to greater antipathy toward Muslims. It is suggested that in this region, elective criteria of belonging have become fused with exclusionary notions of national culture that portray Muslims as incompatible with European liberal values, effectively legitimating anti‐Muslim sentiments in mainstream political culture. This may heighten the appeal of anti‐Muslim sentiments not only on the radical right, but also among mainstream segments of the Northwestern European public, with important implications for social exclusion and political behaviour.

Article Series on the Rise of the Radical Right in The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage

by

The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage published a six-article series I co-edited, with an introductory article by me and Daniel Ziblatt and contributions by Sheri Berman, Lily Mason, Daphne Halikiopoulou, Sofia Vasilopoulou, Tim Bale, and Daniel Kelemen. Here is the link to my Twitter thread that includes links to all the pieces. And here is my lead article.