(University of Washington)
Nationalist Politics as a Manifestation of Collective Narcissism
Collective narcissism—an exaggerated, unrealistic belief in an in-group’s greatness that demands constant external validation—is a strong predictor of a variety of political attitudes. We propose that collective narcissism is an important antecedent of support for nationalistic leaders and attitudes. Using nationally-representative data from the 2016 United States election, we find a strong relationship between collective narcissism and support for the Trump candidacy, net of numerous other predictors of voting behavior. In a second set of analyses, we use nationally-representative panel data from Poland to examine the relationship between collective narcissism and nationalistic attitudes. We first demonstrate that collective narcissism, nationalism and mere satisfaction with national ingroup are distinct. In turn, in both cross-sectional and panel analyses, we find that (1) that collective narcissism is positively related to nationalism, whereas simple pride in or satisfaction with the national ingroup is not; and (2) that collective narcissism is a stronger predictor of nationalism than national-ingroup satisfaction is in absolute terms. Our analyses thus provide evidence that nationalist politics may be rooted in an inflated, insecure exaggeration of the greatness of the national in-group.