(Page 2 of 28) - 21st Century Americanism: What it is and where it comes from authored by Schildkraut, Deborah.

Century Americanism: What it is and where it comes from

This paper fills gaps in our knowledge about the norms and values people use to define

American identity and whether systematic factors determine which types of definitions people
endorse. Previous examinations in this area have been hindered by narrowly tailored measures
that focus on only two components of American identity: liberalism (America as a land of
freedom and opportunity) and ethnoculturalism (America as a nation of white Protestants). Two
other important understandings of American identity that are often overlooked are civic
republicanism (America as a vibrant participatory democracy) and incorporationism (America as
a diverse nation of immigrants). Moreover, previous studies are generally restricted to examining
the views of whites, leaving the study of how non-whites define American identity under-
developed. The present analysis overcomes these limitations by using a new national telephone
survey with oversamples of blacks, Latinos, and Asians and providing one of the most extensive
examinations to date of how Americans define the content of American identity.

In the following sections, I explain why I center my analysis on the content of American

national identity and explore theoretical understandings of that content. Next I develop measures
that aim to assess the extent to which the multiple conceptions of American identity that exist in
theory are endorsed by ordinary Americans. Finally I test the adequacy of these measures and
then use the results of that test to examine various factors that influence how people define what
being American means. I find that a much broader range of conceptions of how Americans
define being American exists than has traditionally been examined. A complex, messy, and often
contradictory set of definitions exist, and it is difficult to reduce these definitions to compact,
neatly demarcated scales. Additionally, I show that some of the concerns of observers like
Samuel Huntington (2004) are somewhat overblown. Most Americans, regardless of their ethnic
or immigrant background, share this messy and contradictory understanding of what being
American means. That said, there are possible seeds of future divergence that we should continue
to investigate. Namely, non-whites are less likely than whites to see the norms of cultural
assimilation and cultural maintenance as mutually exclusive. The extent to which these norms
continue to become salient components of the meaning of American identity should be
evaluated. Finally, this study develops more appropriate measures of the content of American
identity than have been used in the past, providing tools that can be used in future studies of
content and of the consequences that different understandings of American national identity have
on controversial policy debates.

Why Content?

Over the past decade, there has been a steadily growing interest in studying political

identities. Questions garnering attention include: Which of the many group identities that people
might adopt is central to their self-concept? How do they choose? How does their prioritization
shape how they approach the political and social world? How do people arrive at understandings
of what their political identities mean? This increasingly complex and sophisticated research has
illustrated the vast range in which identity can be conceptualized and measured, leading some to
step back and ask what it means, exactly, to study (at the individual level) a political identity in