Nationhood in a Pandemic, Nordic Gold or Nordic Noir? The Interplay between National Identity, Political Trust, Affective Polarization, and Attitudes to Immigrants in Denmark and Sweden in 2020-2021

Covid-19 is testing our societies in the midst of a democratic recession, driven by escalating political distrust, polarization, and anti-immigrant sentiments.

The solution, according to the growing literature on ‘inclusive patriotism’ and ‘liberal nationalism’, lies in a strongly felt yet democratically open national identity able to bridge groups divided by class, ideology, and ethnicity.

Empirical studies, however, have focused on how national identity affects social trust and economic solidarity, not political trust and polarization – which are at the heart of the democratic crisis – and especially not outside of North America.

We will fill this urgent research gap by studying national identity (using an innovative and nuanced new typology) and its different links to political trust, affective polarization (the attribution of bad personal characteristic to political opponents), and minority inclusion in Danish and Swedish public opinion and public debates during the Covid crisis.

These two Nordic welfare states are often mentioned as promising candidates for democratic national identities.

Yet empirical research on contemporary national identity in this context has focused on anti-immigrant voters, not the (seemingly, at least) more inclusive national identity of the majority, whose political trust remains high, affective polarization low, and national pride revolves around the welfare state and democracy – all salient themes in the pandemic.

We will employ mixed methods, analyzing both new and unique survey data (in collaboration with world leading scholars Kymlicka et al.), and narratives of national identity in the covid debates in both countries.

This also enables us to address worrying tensions, such as why civic nationalism in the Nordic countries seems to have a particularly Islamophobic side, and whether narratives of high-trusting Danes and Swedes also come with a darker side: the othering of immigrants during the pandemic.