‘This country is OURS’: The exclusionary potential of collective psychological ownership

About:

This mixed methods research used methods such as social psychology and structural equation modelling to attain findings.

We used online surveys to collect the data among nationally diverse samples of 572 Dutch and 495 British natives. The method of analysis was structural equation modelling, which combines factor analysis and multiple regression analysis.

The British results are generalisable to the native British population as the data were representative in terms of gender, age, education and country (England, Scotland, and Wales). In the Dutch sample, higher educated, older people, and men were overrepresented. Although we mostly found similar patterns as with the British data, one should be more cautious with generalisation in the Dutch context.

With the research method used we cannot infer causality. Although we have good reasons to expect a sense of country ownership to influence exclusionary attitudes and behaviour, it is also possibly that a sense of country ownership is used to justify one’s pre-existing exclusionary attitudes and voting behaviour.

Our study focused only on the exclusionary consequences of a sense of ownership. However, ownership feelings can be accompanied by a sense of responsibility cascading into more positive outcomes, such as willingness to be politically active, volunteer, and make a contribution to society more generally. The positive consequences should be considered when designing interventions to tackle exclusionary attitudes and behaviour.

A sense of country ownership is only one of many explanations for exclusionary attitudes and behaviour.

Moreover, although Western European countries as Great Britain and The Netherlands have some specific characteristics, we expect a sense of country ownership to be of similar importance for intergroup relations in different contexts, such as developing countries, conflict areas, or settler societies.