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END OF PROJECT RESEARCH REPORT

Being British: National Identity in a Global Context

Background

Our application was designed to enable Britain’s continued participation in the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), a grouping of research teams which brings together over 40 nations worldwide. Our application focussed on the 2003 round of the ISSP, the nineteenth in the series, which covered national identity. Thirty-four countries participated in the 2003 round. Funding for the 2003 ISSP in Britain allowed both continuity of British participation in the ISSP, allowed the international academic community to include Britain in their analyses of national identity, and finally gave the British research team opportunities for investigating national identity within Britain.

To cite this output:Heath, A (2007). Being British: National Identity in a Global Context : Full Research Report.ESRC End of Award Report, RES-000-22-0326. Swindon: ESRC

Objectives

The main aims of the research, as described in the grant proposal, wereto participate in the 2003 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) module on national identity; to merge the 2003 data with the 1995 module and, where possible, with earlier data to construct a combined dataset; to construct scales measuring different dimensions of national pride, nationalist sentiment and ethnocentrism; to publish over-time analysis of national identity in Britain; to publish cross-national analysis comparing Britain with the other countries participating in the ISSP.

We have successfully achieved all these objectives.

The national identity module was fielded as part of the 2003 British Social Attitudes survey. The British data were deposited at the Data Archive in the usual way, and were also merged (by the ISSP team in charge of this aspect of the work) with the data collected by the other countries in order to generate a combined ISSP dataset. This too has been deposited at the Data Archive.

We merged the 2003 with the 1995 datasets and also created a further combined dataset for the analysis of over-time trends in British national pride drawing on the World Values Surveys and the Eurobarometer series.

We have constructed measures of differing dimensions of national pride and national identity and have used these in our published work to understand changes over time in national identity in Britain. These measures have focussed on ethnic and civic identities in Britain, measures of patriotism and measures of xenophobia.

We have published over-time analysis of national identity in Britain, analysis that received extensive media coverage and has been of considerable interest to the user community and to government.

And we have carried out cross-national analysis of the ISSP data, presenting these results at the ISA conference. We are currently revising this paper for publication in an international refereed journal.

Methods

The British module of the ISSP was fielded by the National Centre for Social Research as part of the 2003 British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey. The planned module of 60 items (attached to the original grant application) was duly fielded in version B of the self-completion supplement. The fieldwork was conducted between June 2003 and September 2003. A total of 857 respondents completed the module. For further details of the 2003 BSA see Alison Park, John Curtice, Katarina Thomson, Catherine Bromley and Miranda Phillips (eds.), British Social Attitudes: The 21st Report. London: Sage.


A condition of ISSP membership is that members regularly attend the annual ISSP conference, at which the content of future ISSP modules is discussed. In 2003 this was held in Strasbourg, France, and was attended by Alison Park from the British Social Attitudes team.

For analysis of over-time trends we merged these 2003 data with the 1995 ISSP module, also carried on the BSA. We also used data from a variety of sources to trace national pride in Britain back from the present day to the beginning of the 1980s. We used data from the 1981 and 1990 World Values Survey (WVS), data from the 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1994 and 1997 Eurobarometer series, as well as the 2003 ISSP data.

The ISSP team responsible then merged the British dataset with those of the 33 other participating countries, although they took rather longer to achieve this than they had originally planned, due to the late arrival of the US data. This delayed the start of our cross-national analysis. Eventually, however, the merged dataset was made available through the Zentralarchiv fur Empirische Sozialforschung at the University of Cologne, and we were able to carry out our comparative analyses.

In order to achieve our intellectual objectives, we added further aggregate-level data to the cross-national dataset. These included information on ethnic diversity, both at founding of the state and currently, and level of GDP, again both at founding of the state and currently.

Full details of the questionnaire, and more information on the ISSP, can be found at the website (http://www.issp.org/).


Results

Construction of scales measuring different dimensions of national pride, nationalist sentiment and ethnocentrism

In a series of papers we have developed scales measuring ethnic and civic aspects of national identity, national sentiment and patriotism, and ethnocentrism. These results are reported in James Tilley, Anthony Heath and Sonia Exley (2005), Anthony Heath and James Tilley (2005), James Tilley, Anthony Heath and Rob Ford (2006) and Anthony Heath (2007).

We began by constructing measures of the ethnic and civic dimensions of British identity, which are central to many of the theoretical debates about national identity. As part of the 2003 ISSP module, respondents were asked:

Some people say that the following things are important for being truly British. Others say that they are not important. How important do you think each of the following is [Very important/ Fairly important/ Not very important/ Not important at all/ Can’t choose] a) To have been born in Britain. b) To have British citizenship. c) To have lived in Britain. d) To be able to speak English. e) To be a Christian. f) To respect Britain’s political institutions and laws. g) To feel British. h) To have British ancestry.

As can be see in Table 1 below, which shows factor analysis loadings for each item, these questions reveal two distinct dimensions of national identity which correspond to ethnic and civic conceptions rather well. Items on the list that refer to birthplace, ancestry and ethnic components of ‘Britishness’ load together, and conversely the items that refer to characteristics that can in principle be acquired, such as feeling British, speaking English, and respect for British institutions, load together on a separate dimension. This is exactly the same pattern that Jones and Smith found in their analysis of the same items from the ISSP 1995 module on national identity.


TABLE 1 Scores for maximum likelihood factor analysis of criteria for national identity

Civic dimension Ethnic dimension Born in Britain * .73British citizenship .45 *

Lived life in Britain * .58Speak English .51 *

Be a Christian * .52Respect laws/institutions .60 *

Feel British .64 *

British ancestry * .76

Initial Eigenvalues 1.18 3.41Source: British Social Attitudes Survey 2003, British citizens only (unweighted N=744) * Scores below 0.4 not reported.

While we have two conceptually distinct dimensions, it is important to recognize that they are correlated. In other words, many respondents will score highly on both the civic and on the ethnic dimensions. What we find is that there is broad consensus in Britain on the importance of civic aspects of British identity – speaking English, respecting British political institutions and so on – with 60% scoring in the highest category of the civic scale and a further 28% in the next highest category. But there is some considerable dissensus on the importance of ethnic aspects, with respondents spread much more evenly across the four categories of the scale.

This suggests a pattern of three key groups as regards their conceptions of British identity. One group of respondents score highly on both civic and ethnic conceptions of identity and make up around half the sample. A second group score highly on the civic identity scale but lowly on the ethnic identity scale. The third group consists of the relatively small number of respondents who seem to believe neither dimension of national identity is important for ‘true’ Britishness. Finally, there is hardly anyone in the sample who supports an ethnic conception of identity on its own. (Exploratory cluster analysis shows that if we increase cluster numbers from two to six in a K-means cluster analysis, the mean distance from cluster centres shows by far the biggest improvement moving from two to three clusters, and relatively little improvement after that. For further details of this categorization see Tilley et al 2004.)We validated this typology using further questions on citizenship rights. Respondents were asked:

How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements? Children born in Britain of parents who are not citizens should have the right to become British citizens. Children born abroad should have the right to become British citizens if at least one of their parents is a British citizen. Legal immigrants to Britain who are not citizens should have the same rights as British citizens.


We would expect that people who adopt more ethnic conceptions of citizenship would tend to disagree with these statements, and indeed the expected pattern is shown in Table 2.

TABLE 2 Conceptions of national identity and attitudes towards citizenship issues

Conceptionof national identity

% agreeing that children born in Britain should have the right to become citizens

% agreeing that children born abroad should have the same right to become citizens

% agreeing that legal immigrants who are not citizens should have the same rights

N

Ethnic and civic

52.7 61.3 30.0 439

Civic only 75.8 79.4 55.2 300Neither 68.9 60.8 40.5 78All 62.2 66.9 39.6 833Source: British Social Attitudes Survey 2003

As we can see, people who have ‘civic only’ conceptions of citizenship are much the most likely to support rights to acquire citizenship and to give equal rights to legal immigrants. The ‘neither civic nor ethnic’ group come next, while the ‘ethnic-cum-civic’ group are much the most hostile to these rights.

In previous work we have shown the continued importance of British national sentiment as a notion which should be ‘conceptualised as an autonomous principle in its own right’ for its explanatory power in determining views on issues such as Europe, nuclear defence, devolution and Irish unification in survey analysis (Heath et al, 1999: 158). Using a battery of questions from the ISSP (and very similar to those originally developed by Heath et al in 1999), we created a scale measuring how ‘patriotic’ individuals are. This might be best thought of as a measure of affective attachment to the nation, capturing an emotional bond or sense of closeness to the nation. The scale uses the following questions.

Please tick one box to say how much you agree or disagree with the following statements [Agree strongly/ Agree/ Neither agree nor disagree/ Disagree/ Disagree strongly/ Can’t choose]

I would rather be a citizen of Britain than of any other country in the worldThere are some things about Britain today that make me feel ashamed of Britain The world would be a better place if people from other countries were more like the British Generally speaking, Britain is a better country than most other countriesPeople should always support their country, even if the country is in the wrong


When my country does well in international sports, it makes me feel proud to be British I am often less proud of Britain than I would like to be.

Answers to these seven items were turned into a ‘patriotism scale’, scored from 0 (least patriotic) to 10 (most patriotic). (McCrone and Surridge have previously used these items in a similar fashion.) These items work well as a single scale, all the items falling into a single dimension and the overall scale having a high level of internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.68). This patriotism scale also correlates well with a simple measure of national pride (a correlation of 0.60).

This notion of patriotism is conceptually distinct from our measures of ethnic and civic conceptions of national identity. However, empirically we find that there is a strong association between the measure of patriotism and the scale measuring an ethnic conception of identity. The correlation between the two measures is 0.56, whereas the correlation between patriotism and a civic conception is much weaker at 0.31. Not surprisingly, therefore, we find that there is a strong association between our typology of national identities and the new measure of patriotism: people who have ethnic-cum-civic conceptions of British identity have the highest score on the patriotism scale; people with ‘civic only’ conceptions have rather lower scores, while the third group who reject both civic and ethnic conceptions have the lowest levels of patriotism.

We followed a similar procedure to construct a measure of xenophobia based on the items on attitudes towards immigrants in the 1995 and 2003 ISSP modules. The 2003 ISSP module on national identity asked the following five questions:

There are different opinions about immigrants from other countries living in [COUNTRY]. (By “immigrants” we mean people who come to settle in [COUNTRY]). How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? (Please tick one box on each line)

Immigrants increase crime rates Immigrants are generally good for [country’s] economy. Immigrants take jobs away from people who were in [country] Immigrants improve [country nationality] society by bringing in new ideas and cultures

The response codes were ‘agree strongly’, ‘agree’, ‘neither agree nor disagree’, disagree’, ‘disagree strongly’.

Do you think the number of immigrants to [country] nowadays should be … increased a lot, increased a little, remain the same as it is, reduced a little, reduced a lot? Can’t choose.

Only one factor was extracted from these five items and Cronbach’s alpha was 0.75. An additive scale was constructed from these five items and rescaled from 0 to 100. Similar measures are also available in the European Social Survey and in the Eurobarometer, and our analyses show that all three measures yield very similar pictures of cross-national variation in xenophobia. At the individual level we also find a strong relationship between an ethnic-cum-civic conception of the nation and these measures of xenophobia.


Overtime analysis of national identity in Britain

In a series of papers (Tilley et al 2004a, 2004b, Heath et al 2006, Heath et al 2007) we have explored changes in national identity over time. In these papers we have focussed first on describing trends in the proportions who accept a British identity and, second, on levels of pride in Britain.

Table 3 shows that, in both Scotland and England, there has been a long-term decline in the percentages preferring a British identity and corresponding increases in the percentages preferring English and Scottish identities respectively, although the trends in Wales are less clear. We also find that there has been a corresponding large decline in pride in Britain over the last twenty-five years.

TABLE 3: Trends in ‘forced choice’ national identity, 1974 – 2003

1974 1979 1992 1997 1999 2001 2003Lives in England

% % % % % % %

English identity n/a n/a 31 34 44 43 38British identity n/a n/a 63 59 44 44 48

Lives in Scotland

% % % % % % %

Scottishidentity

65 56 72 72 77 77 72

British identity 31 38 25 20 17 16 20

Lives in Wales % % % % % % %Welsh identity n/a 59 n/a 63 57 57 60British identity n/a 34 n/a 26 31 31 27

Sources: BES 1992-97; BSA 1999-2003, SES 1974-97, SSA 1999-2005, WES 1979, WRS 1997, WAES 1999, WLTS 2001, 2003.

A number of different processes have been suggested in the literature for declining attachment to nations, but the primary explanation given for decline is the replacement of older more nationalistic generations with newer less nationalistic generations. This is empirically backed up by the large disparity between birth cohorts in levels of pride. As Figure 1 shows there is a strikingly robust relationship between year of birth and mean score on the pride measure (here 1 corresponds to ‘not at all proud’, and 4 to ‘very proud’). Older cohorts are generally much more proud to be British than younger cohorts.


FIGURE 1 Mean score on the national pride scale (1-4; 4 as most proud) by birth-cohort, 1981-2003

2.75

3

3.25

3.5

3.75

4

1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003Year

Mea

n sc

ore

for n

atio

nal p

ride Pre 1909

1970+1960-1969

1950-1959

1940-19491930-1939

1920-19291910-1919

To cite this output:H

eath, A (2007). B

eing British: N

ational Identity in a Global C

ontext : Full Research R

eport.E

SR

C E

nd of Aw

ard Report, R

ES

-000-22-0326. Sw

indon: ES

RC

There is the well-known ‘identification problem’ when using data such as these to disentangle the effects of generational change, ageing over the life cycle, and period effects. While the generational interpretation cannot be proved, it does seem to be the most plausible interpretation of the data given in Figure 1. Note that there appears to be little change over time in each cohort’s level of pride. Broadly speaking each birth cohort maintains a static level of pride over the 22 year period. For ageing and period effects to be generating this pattern, they would need to be neatly cancelling out each other; as one ages one year, one increases one’s pride by x points, but equally as time moves on one year, one decreases one’s pride by exactly the same x points. Thus, whilst we cannot rule such an explanation out, it seems much more likely that the pattern shown in Figure 1 is caused by generational differences in the population than by opposing life cycle and period effects.

We also find that there are substantial differences between Scotland and the other nations within Britain as to levels of pride, and that these have emerged among younger cohorts. Figure 2 presents predictions from a model with an interaction between birth cohort and nation. (The model also includes controls for religion, social class, and level of education. The predicted scores shown in figure 2 refer to an irreligious, working class man who left education by 16 in 2003.) What this Figure shows is that there are significant interactions between country and birth-year. English residents born more recently are clearly less proud of their ‘Britishness’ than are older generations but this tendency is slightly more pronounced in Wales and much more pronounced in Scotland. Generations born prior to 1920 are very similar to one another, indeed there are no statistically significant differences between the nations for cohorts born prior to 1960. Nonetheless after this period there are clear differences. Whilst the English and Welsh have become less proud of their Britishness with each successive generation, the Scots have become less proud of this identity at an even faster rate. This is most noticeable for the cohorts that were raised in the 1970s onwards (born in 1950 onwards). In England the newest generations are about as proud of being British as those born 20 years earlier. In Scotland however, and to a lesser extent in Wales, pride in Britain continues to decline among newer generations. From a position of similar levels of pride for generations of English and Scots born around 1900, Scottish cohorts coming of age in the 1980s score almost ¼ point less on our scale than their English counterparts.


FIGURE 2 Predicted score on the national pride scale (1-4; 4 as most proud) by birth cohort and nation

2.80

3.00

3.20

3.40

3.60

Pre 1920 1920-29 1930-39 1940-49 1950-59 1960-69 1970+

Generation

Lev

el o

f pri

de

English Welsh Scots


These generational differences, and for that matter national differences, in a general sense of national pride, might be concealing a more complicated picture when we look at exactly what people are proud of. As discussed earlier, it seems plausible that there has been not only decline but also a change in the types of pride that people have in their Britishness, with a move to a more civic type of pride. In a multicultural, post-imperial Britain, pride in the military or in imperial history may be perceived as anachronistic or intolerant. Younger British citizens may instead invest their feelings of pride in more neutral civic ideals such as Britain’s traditions of democracy or the national welfare state. So finally we ask whether this apparent decline in British national pride is a general one, or whether instead there has been a transformation in the ‘ingredients’ of national pride.

The 1995 and 2003 ISSPs included questions on different sources of national pride. In particular they asked how proud Britons were of various institutions, and different facets of life in Britain. Respondents were asked to rate how proud they were (on a 1-5 scale, with 5 as most proud), of: the way democracy works in Britain; Britain’s economic achievements; the social security system; scientific and technological achievements; achievements in sports; achievements in the arts and literature; Britain’s armed forces; Britain’s history; and finally Britain’s fair and equal treatment of all groups in society.

What we find is that in fact pride is lower for almost all of these items amongst newer cohorts. Yet, at the same time, the pattern of more advanced decline seen in Scotland is limited to only certain areas of nationhood. The oldest Scottish cohorts are as proud of the various aspects of Britishness as, or indeed in some cases more proud than, the English. Yet looking at the newest Scottish cohort, there is less uniformity. Younger Scots are much less proud of some aspects of Britain than their English counterparts, but are equally proud of others. In particular if we take areas that are inherently more political and have been shaped by political decisions of the last 50 years (in particular areas which are now more fully controlled by Scotland due to devolution) such as economics, democracy and social security, we see large differences between the youngest and oldest Scottish cohorts. For example the difference between the oldest and youngest cohorts regarding pride in British democracy is 0.75 for Scots and only 0.25 for the English and Welsh. By contrast, aspects of nationality that are less linked to both political changes and change in international context, such as the army, the arts, science and ‘fairness’, show few differences between Scottish and English/Welsh cohorts.

National identity in cross-national perspective

We carried out similar analyses of the ethnic and civic dimensions of national identity on the full ISSP dataset of 34 countries as we had done on the British data. The results showed that the same factor structures obtained overall and that a three-cluster categorisation was the most informative. In this respect, then, Britain was rather typical of the ISSP countries. However, we also found that the proportion of people in each of the three categories varies widely by country. This is shown in Figure 3. France together with the Scandinavian countries tends to have the highest proportion of citizens with civic conceptions of the nation, while countries such as Venezuela and Chile had particularly large proportions with ethnic conceptions.


FIGURE 3 Proportion of each national identity cluster in each country

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

South

Africa

Irelan

d

Venezu

elaSpa

inPola

ndChil

e

Portug

alJap

an

South

Korea

Bulgari

aRuss

ia

Urugua

y

Slovak

ia

Czech R

epub

licItaly

Austria

Hunga

ryLatv

ia

Britain

Taiwan

Sloven

ia

NewZeal

and US

German

yIsr

ael

Finlan

d

Switzerl

and

Hollan

d

Denmark

Canad

a

Norway

Austral

iaFran

ce

Sweden

Civic Ethnic and civic Neither ethnic nor civic


This cross-national variation is to be expected since theories of nationalism predict that historic factors are responsible for the strength and type of nationalism in each nation. However, although predicted, this is rarely tested. We therefore have explicitly tested what country-level factors, whether historic or current, affect national identities. We focus on two main country-level factors – level of modernization (as measured by GDP) and ethnic diversity. We also distinguish between these characteristics at the founding of the state (since many historical accounts of national identity emphasize the continuing legacy of the conditions which held at the time the nation-state was established), and current characteristics. As we also expect individual-level factors, such as education and religion, to be important we use multi-level modelling techniques to predict individuals’ national identity type using both individual -level and country-level variables.

The results of the multi-level modelling show that, at the individual level, the more educated tend to be more likely to fall into the ‘civic’ cluster, as do younger generations, non-citizens and children of non-citizens. Regular church-goers appear slightly more likely to favour an ethnic conception of national identity, although this effect is clearly weaker than that of generation, citizenship and education. The effects of sex and trade union membership are very weak, and not statistically significant. Whilst for an individual these factors are fairly strong predictors of national identity type (we predict that a male, irreligious degree holder born in 1960 with citizenship has a 47% chance of being a ‘civic’ nationalist, compared to only 17% to a similar man without a degree), they nonetheless cannot fully explain the large differences between countries that exist. The proportion of immigrants, the proportion of second generation immigrants and levels of educational attainment do not vary hugely across most countries, and as such cannot possibly account for most of the country-level variation observed. For instance, there are reasonably similar proportions of degree holders in Venezuela and Denmark (and indeed the former has a younger age structure which should encourage civic nationalism according to the model), yet there are nearly ten times as many civic nationalists in Denmark as a proportion of the population than there are in Venezuela.

Turning to the country-level contextual factors we find that it is those relating to economic development that seem most important; both current and historic levels of wealth appear to be good predictors of civic nationalism. Individuals from countries with currently high levels of GDP are much more likely to have a civic conception of their national identity; and also people from countries with higher levels of GDP at founding, even controlling for current GDP, are significantly more likely to be civic nationalists. On the other hand the impact of ethnic diversity, both currently and historically, seems negligible. Neither high levels of diversity in 2003 nor high levels of diversity at founding have a statistically significant impact on civic nationalism.


FIGURE 4 Predicted probability of being a ‘civic’ nationalist for different levels of GDP per capita, and founding GDP levels

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

5000 15000 25000 35000 45000GDP per capita (US dollars 2004)

% 'c

ivic

' nat

iona

lists

rel

ativ

e to

'civ

ic a

nd e

thni

c'

Rich at founding

Poor at founding

The magnitude of the two GDP effects are shown in Figure 4. Here we present the predicted probabilities of being a civic nationalist (as opposed to being an ethnic–cum-civic nationalist) at different levels of current GDP per capita and different levels of historic wealth. As Figure 4 shows, the impact of current wealth is large, an individual living in one of the richest countries in our sample being four times as likely to be a civic nationalist as someone living in one of the poorest countries. The impact of historic wealth, whilst less important than current GDP, is not just statistically significant but also substantial. These findings thus provide strong support for the modernist camp. At the individual level education appears extremely important and at the contextual level modernization, in the form of historic economic development and current development, is a crucial predictor of civic nationalism.


Activities

As stated in the grant proposal, the award enabled the participation of Britain in the 2003 ISSP conference in Strasbourg, France. The meeting was attended by Alison Park. The team also took part in the special issue of the International Journal on Multicultural Societies, which was devoted to the work of the ISSP module on national identity, and in the ISSP panel at the International Sociological Association 2006.

The grant proposal promised the dissemination of findings by means of scholarly papers delivered at academic and non-academic meetings. This dissemination has included the following presentations.

Academic meetings

James Tilley, Anthony Heath and Sonia Exley (2004a) ‘Generational change in British identity’. Paper presented at the Elections, Public Opinion and Partiesannual conference, Oxford, September 2004.

James Tilley, Anthony Heath and Sonia Exley (2004b) ‘The decline of Britishness’. Paper presented at the CREST conference Brought Together or Driven Apart, Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, November 2004.

Anthony Heath (2005a) ‘The decline of British identity: age, period and cohort effects’. Paper presented at the ISER, University of Essex, January 2005.

Sophie Duchesne and Anthony Heath (2005) ‘National identity in Britain and France: comparative perspectives’. Paper presented at the Maison Francaise d’Oxford conference on European Identity and Euroscepticism. May 2005.

James Tilley, Anthony Heath and Robert Ford (2006) ‘Why does nationalism differ across nations? An empirical investigation of the factors that cause different forms of nationalism to emerge in different contexts’. Paper presented at International Sociological Association annual meeting, Durban 2006.

Non-academic meetings

Anthony Heath (2005b) ‘The nature of British national identity’. Paper presented to the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office, October 2005.

Anthony Heath (2005c) ‘Are traditional identities in decline?’. Paper presented to the Hansard Society, June 2005.

Anthony Heath (2006) ‘The decline of British national identity’. Paper presented at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), June 2006.


Outputs

The grant proposal committed the investigators to producing a British data-set for submission to the UK Data Archive and this has been done. The proposal also committed us to presenting the results of the over-time British analysis at the 2004 CREST conference and of the cross-national analysis at conferences such as the ISA. We also said that there would be further dissemination in article and book form. As described above, the conference presentations were duly given. There has also been considerable further dissemination, in the form of both articles and book chapters. In total six articles have either been published or are currently under review.

James Tilley, Anthony Heath and Sonia Exley (2005), ‘Dimensions of British identity’. Pp 147-167 in Alison Park, John Curtice, Katarina Thomson, Catherine Bromley and Miranda Phillips (eds.), British Social Attitudes: The 21st Report. London: Sage.

Anthony Heath and James Tilley (2005), ‘British national identity and attitudes towards immigration’, International Journal on Multicultural Societies 7:199-132.

Anthony Heath, Robert Ford, Allison Gilmore and Maria Sobolewska (2006), British Identity. Report by the Department of Sociology, Oxford University for the Cabinet Office.

Anthony Heath, Jean Martin and Gabriella Elgenius (2007) ‘Who do we think we are? The decline of traditional social identities.’ Pp 1-34 in A. Park, J. Curtice, K. Thomson, M. Phillips and M.Johnson (eds) British Social Attitudes: the 23rd Report – Perspectives on a Changing Society. London: Sage.

Anthony Heath (forthcoming) ‘Patterns and processes of ethnic disadvantage’. Chapter 15 in Anthony Heath and Sin Yi Cheung (eds) UnequalChances: Ethnic Minorities in Western Labour Markets. Oxford: OUP for the British Academy.

James Tilley and Anthony Heath, ‘The decline of British national pride’, under review at British Journal of Sociology.

James Tilley, Anthony Heath and Robert Ford, ‘Why does nationalism differ across nations?’ (In preparation for submission to an international journal.)


Impacts

Our work has proved to be of considerable interest to government and to the media and has fed into the public debates. Our work on the distinction between ethnic and civic conceptions of national identity and on trends in national pride informed our work for the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Our work on trends in national identity has also been of interest to the Hansard Society and to journalists and received widespread media coverage when it was published in the 2007 British Social Attitudes Report, being mentioned on the Today programme on radio and on national television news. While it is too early to say whether our findings have directly influenced government policy, they have helped to inform the debates and to provide crucial background evidence on patterns of change in the incidence and nature of Britishness.

Future Research Priorities

Given the wide public interest in the nature of national identity, the trends over time in patterns of national identity, and concerns about the possible consequences, we suggest there are two research priorities. First, it will be essential to monitor these trends, replicating the questions that we have used for this report and thus enabling us to chart developments over time. It would be highly desirable to be able to provide annual figures on levels of national identities (including English, Welsh and Scottish as well as British), levels of patriotism and national pride, and the character (ethnic or civic) of those identities. Some regular government surveys do now include a few relevant measures, but there are no regular sources for the full set of measures which we believe to be desirable.

Secondly, there is an urgent need for fundamental research on the implications of national identity. National identity is frequently regarded as providing a kind of ‘social glue’ that helps citizens to identify with their country, serves to legitimate the political order, and leads citizens to feel obligations both to the state and to their fellow citizens that they would not feel otherwise. However, there is little systematic research exploring these consequences of national identity (although we attempted to address this question using less-than-ideal existing data in our report to the Cabinet Office). New data collection and analysis is urgently needed in order to provide evidence-based research that can be fed into the current public debates about the nature of role of national identity in Britain.


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