Colorblind Ethnocentrism: How Ancestry and Race Continue to Define Western National Identities

Research on national identity in Western Europe and the United States has found that people in these countries de-emphasize the ethnic components of national membership, such as having ancestry in the country, and favor civic components such as political participation. However, sociologists whose research center immigrants' experiences in these countries find that they are never fully perceived as "national" because of their ancestry. Using a pre-registered, nationally representative, novel conjoint experiment fielded in 5 different countries, I find that natives' understanding of who belongs in the nation might be understood as "colorblind ethnocentrism": while people espouse civic normative understandings of the nation, they draw symbolic boundaries of national belonging based on ancestry. Moreover, when respondents do express a normative preference for ancestry in survey measures, it translates to a revealed preference for white and Christian members of the nation. Finally, in Europe (outside the UK), people imagine the nation as White, while this is not the case in the US and the UK overall. These findings help us understand why nativist discourse can easily take hold in liberal democracies, despite people's explicit disavowal of such discourse.