What is a Patriot? A Cross-National Study in China and the United States

Abstract

Patriotism is a pervasive political force. However, not much is known about how people understand what it means to be "patriotic"in the first place. We conduct a cross-country study of mass understandings of patriotism. Through parallel national surveys in two global superpowers-China and the United States-we uncover the substantively different understandings of what it means to be "patriotic"between and within countries, and how the different understandings may map onto different policy prefer- ences. In particular, while the literature draws a distinction between (be- nign) patriotism and (malign) nationalism, we find that most Chinese respondents-and about a third of American respondents-understand patriotism as nationalism. The nationalistic understanding of patriotism, in turn, corresponds to more hawkish foreign policy preferences. By un- packing folk intuitions about patriotism and mapping them onto existing scholarly debates, we bridge the distance between the academic literature and the mass political behavior it seeks to explain.