Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper asks what are the factors that prompt individuals to support the initiatives of chauvinistic nationalist leaders? I argue that both the ethnic conflict and nationalist literatures have not given sufficient attention to the individual level factors that would prompt ordinary people to follow nationalist leaders and eventually engage in violence for the sake of their group. But rather, the majority of the research from both the rationalist and ideational traditions have deduced the factors that drive individual and mass behavior from theoretical assumptions and evidence the centers only on the actions and rhetoric of elites. Thus, while scholars have adequately addressed how elites can mobilize mass populations, they have given little attention as to why elites are able to do to so. To address these empirical and theoretical gaps, I develop an approach that builds upon symbolic politics theory and insights from social psychology. I contend that hostile myths and symbols evoke an array of negative emotions that facilitates more rigid thinking and an openness to taking risks, and that individuals support elites who offer an outlet for these emotions because it fulfills basic psychological needs such as having a positive individual and collective sense self-esteem and a feeling of control over the current situation and the future. I test both my modified symbolic politics approach and its rational choice competitor with a laboratory experiment that utilizes 200 undergraduate subjects.