“Globalization and Social Identities at the Individual Level: Populism from Shifting at the Top?”

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the proposition that globalization leads to more transnational and less national identities. Providing an argument specifying how these various international processes could shift identities at the individual level, it hypothesizes that globalization should be associated with more transnational/less national identities for people toward the top of society based on their experience with and information about globalization, but not for those at the bottom. Based on the identity shift happening at the top but not at the bottom, globalization should also be associated with a larger identity difference between the elite and the mass public. Using data from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey conducted across fifty-six countries from 2010 to 2014 and the seventh wave across forty-four countries from 2017 to 2020, it presents results consistent with these hypotheses. These results help explain the current “anti-global” backlash, providing evidence consistent with populist theories but inconsistent with rising nationalism.