Patriotism, Economic Individualism and Inequality Policy Preference — Evidence from Surveys in Germany and China

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Using survey data collected in Germany and China, this paper examines the impact of patriotism on individuals’ fairness perception and preferences regarding inequality and on their attitudes toward economic policy involving inequality. Across surveys and countries, a positive and significant effect of blind patriotism on economic individualism is found. For China, we also find a significant relationship between blind patriotism and the agreement to unequal economic policy. In contrast to blind patriotism, we do not find an association of constructive patriotism to economic individualism and to attitudes toward economic policy involving inequality. We conducted an online survey in Germany and China and a follow-up one in Germany in 2022. The surveys were in local language (Chinese or German), took around 15 minutes to finish, and were advertised via mailing list and social media at two participating universities. The questionnaire consisted of three parts. The first one included priming tools aiming at activating constructive and blind patriotism. The second entailed items aimed to elicit constructive and blind patriotism, fairness perception of social and economic inequality, and attitudes toward economic policy involving inequality. The final section collected the socio-demographic characteristics. In the second survey, we also included questions in the last section eliciting the political party preferences of respondents by asking them how likely is it that they will vote for the main parties in the next federal election. The survey questions for our main variables can be found in the online appendix for our corresponding manuscript.

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