(Page 9 of 28) - 21st Century Americanism: What it is and where it comes from authored by Schildkraut, Deborah.

Two main features of the 21

Century Americanism survey improve upon existing

attempts to assess how Americans define the content of American identity. The first involves the
way in which the series of questions is introduced. The second involves the range of items
included in the questionnaire.

Existing survey items designed to capture how Americans define the content of American

identity, such as the ones used in the 1996 GSS, generally use the following format: “Some
people say the following things are important for being truly American. Others say they are not
important. How important do you think each of the following is?” Then they proceed to ask
about a handful of ideas that tap into America’s liberal and ethnocultural traditions. This wording
makes it difficult, if not impossible, to know if respondents are saying what they normatively
believe to be important characteristics for Americans to have or if they are simply
acknowledging that particular characteristics have generally been influential in defining someone
as American. For example, I might say that being a Christian is very important in making
someone a true American because I recognize that non-Christians have often felt excluded from
the American mainstream. I may deplore this reality, but I may still agree that Christianity has
played a central role in defining American identity. The present survey addresses this conflation
of acknowledgment and normative approval by asking respondents: “I’m going to read a list of
things that some people say are important in making someone a true American. The first one is
________. Would you say that it should be very important, somewhat important, somewhat
unimportant, or very unimportant in making someone a true American?” This change allows for
a greater likelihood that respondents’ answers will reflect their own American ideal. The
emphasis, in other words, is more explicitly on the aspects of American identity that respondents
prize, for it is this emphasis that will enable us to determine what people have in mind when they
say that being American is important to them and makes them proud.

The items that follow the battery introduction consist of both items that have been asked

in previous surveys and items that I believe needed to be added in order to develop a more
accurate operationalization of the content of American identity. Below, I describe each item
according to the broader conception it was intended to measure (a match that is tested
empirically in later sections). Table 1 lists each item, the tradition it was intended to measure, the
percentage of respondents that says the item is either very or somewhat important, and the
standard deviations.

[Table 1 About Here]

Ethnoculturalism: The first two items (being born in America and being a Christian)

come directly from the tried-and-true GSS battery of American identity items while the last two
items (having European ancestors and being white) are new and more directly capture
ethnoculturalism’s exclusivity. Perhaps not surprisingly, those last two items garner the least
amount of support. Endorsement of ethnoculturalism overall, however, is still at a non-trivial
level. Thirty-five percent of respondents say Americans should be Christians, 17% say
Americans should have European ancestors, and 10% say Americans should be white. At some

Percentages are weighted with the population weights provided by the SESRC. To minimize respondent fatigue,

the American identity series was randomly divided into two halves. The first half was asked early in the survey; the
second half was asked later. The items within each half were rotated randomly.