Grocery Shopping for America: External vs. Internal Threats to National Identity

Abstract:

Nationalist political strategies capitalize on the psychology of external threats to justify harshness towards outgroups. We hypothesize that while external threats strengthen national identication, harshness towards outgroups that degrades in-group's constituent values (internal threat) weakens national identication. We test the causal effects of US war casualties (external threat) and Abu Ghraib torture scandal (internal threat) on national identication using weekly sales of American-sounding supermarket brands, a behavioral proxy for national identification. In our sample spanning over 8,000 brands and 1,100 supermarkets, the market share of American-sounding brands increased in stores following the death of a solider from the same county. These same brands' national market shares
declined during Abu Ghraib. A July 2018 lab experiment reveals that Chinese import competition (external threat) strengthens Americans' national identication but backlash against refugee family border separations (internal threat) weakens identication. Our ndings suggest that nationalist political strategies can backfire if pushed too far.