Elites often promote competing national narratives: stories about the nation’s identity, history, and defining characteristics. As the much-discussed recent rise in ethnic nationalist narratives worldwide attests, the relative standing of these narratives can vary over time. What happens when a competing national narrative rises to dominance at the elite level? How malleable are public conceptions in response to changes in elite-led narratives? This Element aims to answer these questions by providing a theoretical framework and evidence to advance understandings of shifts in elite-led national narratives, their impact on public conceptions of the nation and who belongs, and the mechanisms through which such eects are realized. We take as our primary case India, where an elite consensus based around a secular understanding of national identity has – as in many other regions around the world – more recently given way to a dominant ethno-cultural one. First, we provide a historical account of competing national narratives at the elite level and changes in their relative standing. Second, we draw on original survey data and a conjoint experiment to show that public conceptions of national identity mirror elite narratives and are fragmented along religious and partisan lines. Third, we document using publicly-available survey data that public conceptions have moved toward alignment with the ethno-cultural narrative as it has become increasingly dominant at the elite level. Fourth, we demonstrate in a survey experiment that elite promotion of narratives through symbols – the use of the Sanskrit word for the country (“Bharat”) versus “India” in speech – can shift conceptions of national identity. Our findings underline the existence of multiple, competing conceptions of national identity, demonstrate how they can differ across time and individuals, and highlight the important role of elites in shifting individuals’ perceptions.

Across the world, rising ethnic nationalism is leading to a deepening marginalization of ethnic minority communities. How does such exclusion affect marginalized group members’ sense of self and their commitment to the devalued in-group? Research suggests that minorities may respond to exclusion either by attaching more strongly to the minority group identity and defending the devalued group, or by disassociating from the devalued group in an attempt to seek acceptance by the majority. Through behavioural games in a laboratory setting in the field, this study explores how exclusion affects social identity choices and group commitment among Muslims in India. By randomly assigning a prime that highlights the symbolic exclusion suffered by Muslims in the context of rising Hindu nationalism, and by categorizing participants into high- and low-status groups, we study the role of social status in conditioning responses to exclusion. Specifically, we study responses to questions about social identity and behaviour in games aimed at eliciting pro-social behaviour towards in-group members among a sample of 320 Indian Muslims from Pune, Maharashtra. Our findings suggest that high- and low-status group members respond differently to exclusion; while the prime leads low-status group members to attach more strongly to their high-status (Maharashtrian) identity and reduces their contributions to Muslim in-group members and Muslim NGOs in dictator games, the prime has little effect on high-status minorities, somewhat increasing their contributions in dictator games. Our findings contribute to a growing literature on the effect of rejection on social identity choices and sociopolitical behaviour among marginalized groups.

Working Papers

Equal or Less Than? How National Narratives Undermine or Uphold Democracy (with Nicholas Haas)

Recently, leaders have come to power in contexts ranging from India to the United States aiming to redefine national narratives and challenge democratic institutions. We theorize that these are not independent developments: exclusionary (inclusionary) narratives make it easier (harder) for citizens to justify trespassing on the democratic rights of political opponents. We test our theory in two pre-registered studies (N = 5, 486) in India and the U.S. We first document a strong association between internalized narratives and democratic support. Second, we find that experimentally assigning inclusive national narratives from history textbooks increases ethnic minorities’ perceived centrality to the nation, as well as stated and revealed democratic support among individuals who associate the political opposition with minorities. Experimental effects only materialize in the U.S., a difference we attribute to a comparatively dominant exclusionary narrative in India. Our study provides new insights into national narratives and how they can alternatively undermine or undergird democratic support.

Ethnonationalist governments adopt symbolic policies that challenge the status of ethnic and religious minorities as equal members of the nation. We propose that exposure to such policies reduces the cognitive bandwidth of marginalised groups, leading to suboptimal economic decisions. We test this hypothesis in India, where the Muslim minority population has faced exclusionary policies. About 1,800 gig workers performed data entry and information processing tasks in a field experiment. In the course of completing their tasks, workers were randomly exposed to social media content referencing exclusionary policies. The policies varied in whether they were primarily symbolic or whether they were also likely to cause direct material harm to affected Muslim participants. We measured decision making by allowing workers to choose between two payment contracts—one of which would objectively lead to higher earnings for a given worker. Despite no change in productivity, treated participants were significantly more likely to select economically suboptimal (‘wrong’) contracts, leading to lower earnings. We explore additional data, including cognitive tests and categorisations of mistakes, that suggest that wrong contract choice is driven by increased cognitive load. Our findings demonstrate how even purely symbolic exclusionary policies can have tangible economic consequences, potentially exacerbating marginalisation of minority groups through cognitive and psychological channels.

Resisting National Narrative Change: The Role of Subnationalism (with Nicholas Haas and Maya Tudor)

Political leaders across the globe have come to power by advocating exclusionary national narratives, yet citizen adoption of these narratives varies widely across regions and social groups. We argue that national elites seeking to redefine the nation face durable constraints in regions where existing subnational narratives are normatively incongruent with the proposed change to national identity. In such contexts, subnational elites and institutions sustain alternative understandings of national belonging that limit narrative uptake. We test this argument in India by constructing survey-based state- and individual-level measures of subnational identity salience and religious inclusivity, and examining their relationship with the Hindu nationalist narrative promoted by the nationally dominant Bharatiya Janata Party. We complement this analysis with framing experiments that assess heterogeneity in nationalist narrative acceptance, and with comparative case studies of Tamil Nadu and Kerala—two southern states with strong inclusive subnational identities that differ in whether inclusion is achieved through cultural and linguistic opposition or pluralist recognition of religion. Our findings suggest that in decentralized political systems, subnational narratives that specifically recognize religious inclusivity can meaningfully constrain national narrative change, even under sustained national political dominance.

Selected Ongoing Projects