Minority Affirmations and the Boundaries of the Nation: Evidence From Québec

Cultural criteria, like language skills and values, are salient features of nationalism discourse, reflecting imagined boundaries that separate ingroup from outgroup member when thinking about the nation. Despite their salience, the relationship between cultural membership criteria and other civic (attainable) or ethnic (ascriptive) national boundaries, along with their implications for intergroup relations, is contested. Using surveys from N = 6448 majority group members in the Canadian province of Québec, we argue cultural boundaries are empirically distinct from civic and ethnic ones. Cultural and civic criteria are both prominent prerequisites for membership into the Québécois national community, but cultural criteria show markedly divergent relationships with outgroup attitudes. The results underline the importance of conceptualizing cultural boundaries as a distinct set of national membership criteria and question the construct validity of blended ethnocultural boundary measures or approaches that aggregate civic and cultural criteria together as equally “attainable” markers of national membership.