Instruction

Respondents were given the following instructions.

How proud are you of [COUNTRY] in each of the following? (Please, check one box on each line)

Items

Table 1

Items of the Political Pride Scale

Table 2

Items of the Cultural Pride Scale

Note. There was an additional item included in this series of questions. How proud are you of [COUNTRY] in each of the following: “[COUNTRY’s] economic achievements”. This item had low loadings for most countries and was excluded from our analysis early on. There are also conflicts in the literature about whether this content belongs under Cultural Pride or Political pride.

Response specifications

Response categories included Very proud, Somewhat proud, Not very proud, Not proud at all, and also Can’t choose. Numbers were not provided to respondents, only the response category labels.

Scoring

There were no reverse keyed items for either scale. The unweighted mean score for each scale is used as the score for each respondent. The response categories were assigned the following numbers: 1 = Very proud, 2 = Somewhat proud, 3 = Not very proud, 4 = Not proud at all. Can’t choose (8) responses and other no answer responses (9) were coded as missing values for our analyses.

For the analyses the order of the values was reversed so that larger values reflect more agreement with the items (4 = Very proud, 1 = Not proud at all). We recommend that no more than 1 item per scale being missing in order to calculate the respondent’s score on the scale.

Application field

The purpose of these two scales is to measure two sub-types of National Pride (pride in one’s country). The ISSP has included these economic scales (processing time < 3 minutes) under the National Identity module in three waves (1995, 2003, 2013) so far. No changes to the items have been recorded. A cumulative dataset across all waves is available at the GESIS website. The scale is available in 49 languages (details in section “Item Generation and Selection” below) and has been administered to 34 countries in the 2013 dataset. However, only 32 countries administered the specific items measuring national pride in the 2013 wave. Other countries have been included in previous data collection years, with a wide range of survey modes (e.g., PAPI, CAPI, CASI and more) used.

However, our analyses indicate that the Cultural Pride construct is poorly measured by these items for two reasons. First, loadings on the factor were somewhat lower than expected (although above the .30 threshold). Second, expected correlates for Cultural Pride were often in the opposite direction or negligible. We suspect Cultural Pride is a construct which is highly sensitive to contextual factors (e.g., differing histories, differing emphasis on sports or arts and so on) and to the number of cultures within a country (the items implicitly assume a mono-cultural society).

On the other hand, we see evidence that the Political Pride scale is psychometrically sound in 19 of the 32 countries (Croatia, Finland, France, Georgia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK, and the US). In these countries, the Political Pride scale can be used to measure Political Pride for research purposes.

Cultural Pride and Political Pride constructs were originally outlined by Hjerm (2003) using the ISSP data from 1995. Political Pride is defined as national pride in one’s country’s political institutions, social security, and economy (Hjerm, 2003). Hjerm (2003) theorised that civic values underpin Political Pride, and this is one of the key distinctions between Political Pride and Cultural Pride. Cultural Pride, in contrast, is about national pride in one’s country’s history, culture, and achievements. Both constructs are conceptualized as being about an individual’s “relationship with their nation” (Hjerm, 2003, p.416). Hjerm (2003) defines National Pride more broadly as being about the feelings of pride an individual has towards their country.

Both constructs are likely to be context dependent (Hjerm, 2003). Unfortunately, Hjerm’s (2003) article does not report psychometric information about the two scale’s validity or reliability.

The emergence of Cultural Pride and Political Pride as two distinct constructs aligns with work by Meitinger’s (2018), by Ariely (2011), by Lubbers and Smeekes (2022), and by Davidov (2009). For example, Meitinger (2018) noted that respondents from several countries thought about ‘grounded pride’ content from both the Cultural Pride and Political Pride dimensions, when responding to a General National Pride item.

Ariely (2011) created two scales similar to Hjerm’s Cultural Pride and Political Pride scales, using the ISSP 2003 data. Ariely (2011) created a two-item Cultural Patriotism scale (pride in history, and in the arts and literature), and a three-item Political Patriotism scale (pride in social security system, fair and equal treatment of all groups, the way democracy works). Ariely (2011) found that those scoring high on Cultural Patriotism were more likely to endorse cultural and ethnic criteria for national membership, as well as political criteria. Again, most psychometric information on these scales is not provided.

A potential correlate of Political Pride and of Cultural Pride is one’s political ideology. Lubbers and Smeekes (2022) found evidence that greater pride in History, Economic Achievements, and Armed Forces can be linked to having far-right ideologies. The rest of the population were more likely to have pride in the arts and their country’s global influence. Lubbers and Smeekes (2022) also note in their conclusion that there may be more going on at the country level, and that there are other variables to account for.

It is important to note here that Hjerm (2003) originally included the item on economic achievements under Political Pride, not Cultural Pride. Other authors have disagreed. Based on the findings of Lubbers and Smeekes (2022) we originally considered this item as a possible indicator of Cultural Pride. The item performed poorly and was dropped. In our pooled sample this item correlated moderately with items from both scales. We suspect it could belong to either construct depending on the economic context of the country in question.

Item generation and selection

The items were originally developed for the 1995 ISSP National Identity module in British English. Cultural Pride and Political Pride were not the constructs these items were originally intended to measure. Domain-Specific National Pride was the target variable. The following translations were then added, Afrikaans, Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Bicol, Cebuano, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hiligaynon, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Iluko, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maguindanaon, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swazi, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, Venda, Waray, Xhosa, Zulu (ISSP, 2020).

Hjerm (2003) was the first author to re-use these items for the purpose of measuring Cultural Pride and Political Pride, two distinct constructs. He used the 1995 ISSP data to conduct his initial analyses. Similar scales were tested by Ariely (2011) and by Davidov (2009).

Samples

The ISSP 2013 data was used for our scale validation. This included 45,297 respondents from 34 countries (ISSP Research Group, 2015). Sampling approaches varied between countries, with some using simple random sampling or multistage random sampling or geographic stratification to ensure representative sampling (Joye & Sapin, 2016). Data collection methods included face-to-face interviews, self-completion (with interviewer involvement), self-completion by mail, and mixed modes (Joye & Sapin, 2016). Response rates varied between countries (22.9% to 89.0%) (Joye & Sapin, 2016). Data were collected between 2011 and 2015. Age ranged from 15 years old upwards, with most countries only collecting data from 18-year-olds and older. In some countries incentives were offered in the form of a raffle.

Our final dataset included 40,927 respondents from 32 countries. This was after we excluded countries where the survey items were not provided and for participants who did not respond to 3 or more items. This final dataset was approximately 51% female (although this varied across countries between 29.13% to 60.42%), and missing sex information was under 1% for all countries, usually at 0%. Education levels varied somewhat between countries. Age (M = 47.0, SD = 17.3) was more consistent across countries, with most means being in the late forties with a standard deviation of about 17 years. Country specific background variables can be found in the appendix (Table 13).

Item parameters

We calculated means, standard deviations, skewness, excess, percentage of maximum possible scores (POMP) and percentage missing for each item per country and overall. We also report standardized factor loadings of the two-factor model. For country specific statistics please see the Appendix (table 14). Overall pooled sample statistics are used here.

Item means varied between 2.39 to 3.14 (POMP: 46.4 to 71.3) overall, which on the 4-point scale tends slightly towards the greater pride end (stronger agreement). The means of the Political Pride items varied between 2.39 to 2.54 (POMP: 46.4 to 51.2) and were thus a little lower than the means of the Cultural Pride item, which varied around 2.47 to 3.14 (POMP: 49.0 to 71.3).

For all Political Pride items, and half the Cultural Pride items, we see Excess descriptives signal slightly platykurtic distributions, particularly for items V27 (pride in one’s country’s economic achievements) and PP3 (pride in one’s country’s social security system). The distribution for these items is somewhat flat, and the Standard Deviations also reflect this, suggesting that scores for these items tended to be more mid-range and less extreme.

Skewness for items PP1, PP2, PP3, PP 4, and V27 are all low, indicating little to no skew. However, Item CP8 has a small negative skew (indicating more participants endorsed the item) and items CP5, CP6, CP7, and CP9 have larger negative skews, indicating a greater proportion of participants scored at the higher end of the scale. All of these items belong to the Cultural Pride scale.

Missing data was typically under 5% per item, and always under 7% in the overall item statistics. Missing values were typically under 1% and under 5% for all countries.

Table 5

Descriptive Item Statistics for Cultural Pride

Table 6

Descriptive Item Statistics for Political Pride

Item analyses

Our analyses were conducted in R (4.4.1; R Core Team, 2024) using the packages magrittr (Milton Bache et al., 2022), lavaan (Rosseel, 2012), flextable (Gohel & Skintzos, 2024), writexl (Ooms, 2025, sjlabelled (Lüdecke, 2022), tidyr (Wickham et al., 2024), multilevel tools (Wiley, 2025), and dplyr (Wickham et al., 2023).

We were looking for RMSEA to be at least ≤.08 (see MacCallum et al., 1996) or lower, and for CFI to be over .90 at a minimum, but ideally ≥ .95 (Hu & Bentler, 1999), and finally we were looking for the SRMR to be ideally ≤.08 (Hu & Bentler, 1999). These cut-offs are commonly used in Psychology. We decided at least the CFI and RMSEA should reach the minimum thresholds to conclude a country had an acceptable fit.

We expected that a 2-factor structure would emerge when using 9 items. CFAs were run on the data from each country in our sample separately, using a robust maximum likelihood estimator (MLR), identifying the model via standardized latent variables, and using full information maximum likelihood (FIML) to deal with missing data. The fit indices by country are reported below. 

Table 7

Fit Statistics for Single-Group CFAs Assuming a Two-Factor Model

In 10 of the 32 countries the fit indices (e.g., RMSEA, SRMR) indicated that the 2-factor model had an acceptable fit (Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain). It is worth noting the robust CFI was below the ideal .950 for all these countries but was above .90 for all countries except Spain.

The pooled sample (all countries) (χ²(26) = 8,879.374, p < .001, CFI = .905, RMSEA = .096, SRMR = .054) produced standardized loadings above the typically .30 cut-off for both factors. All items loaded significantly onto their respective factors, Cultural Pride items had standardized loadings between .44 and .55, Political Pride items had standardized loadings between .58 and .71. We did not allow cross loadings in our model. The factors of Cultural Pride and Political Pride correlated at .54 (p < .001) for the pooled sample.

Residual correlation matrices for each country showed several item pairs with highly correlated residuals among the countries with an acceptable fit. We flagged any residual correlations that exceeded .10 rounded to 2 decimals (all were between .11 and .38).

The four most common patterns included items PP3 and CP8, alongside PP4 and CP8, followed by PP3 and PP5, and CP8 and CP9. Items CP8 (armed forces), PP3 (social security), and PP4 (fair treatment) are the most common items with problematically high residual correlations. We speculate this is because the fair treatment of groups may have a genuine link to the armed forces and or law enforcement practices in various countries. Pride in history and pride in armed forces were expected, based on the literature, to be key indicators for Cultural Pride but it is possible they have some shared variance beyond the factor due to political ideologies that likely correlate but are not fully captured by the Cultural Pride factor itself. This may also be why there is a link between PP3 (social security) and CP8 (armed forces), and why there is a link between PP3 (social security) and CP5 (scientific and technological), as all relate to government spending. The link between CP8 (armed forces) and CP9 (history) may be more complicated, depending on each country’s history.

These variables appear to be highly sensitive to context. Due to the complex picture, we chose to firstly examine each scale in isolation.

Cultural Pride

We chose to examine Cultural Pride and Political Pride items separately to further investigate the factorial validity of each construct. First, we examine the Cultural Pride items assuming a 1-factor structure. CFAs were run on the data from each country in our sample separately, using a robust maximum likelihood estimator (MLR), identifying the model via standardized latent variables, and using full information maximum likelihood (FIML) to deal with missing data.

Fit indices were better than in the 2-factor two scale model, with 13 countries emerging with good RMSEA (robust), SRMR, and CFI (robust) indices. These countries include some that had a poor fit for the 2-factor model, including Croatia, Norway, France, South Korea, Latvia, and South Africa. Countries where the two-factor model and the Cultural Pride only model fitted well include Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. We report the pooled sample fit indices here (χ²(5) = 2,612.972, p < .001, CFI = .933, RMSEA = .120, SRMR = .041).

Table 8

Fit Statistics for Single-Group CFAs Assuming a One-Factor Model for Cultural Pride

Correlations between residuals were generally very low (under .10), however, Slovakia did have a correlation between the residuals of items CP8 and CP9 (r = .11). Since this was the only exception to the rule and it was only just above the threshold, we decided no further action was required.

For all 13 countries with good fit indices for Cultural Pride, we observed acceptable standardized factor loadings (at or above .30 rounded to 2dp).

The most common pattern of loadings includes the pride in ‘arts and literature’ being the strongest item (average loading at .77, between .69 and .83), with pride in ‘armed forces’ (average .51, between .39 and .63) or pride in ‘history’ (average .57, between .34 and .70) coming in last. Eight countries followed this pattern, Croatia, Denmark, France, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and South Korea. Pride in ‘science’ averaged only slightly between pride in ‘arts and literature’ for this group (averaging .69 between .64 and .76), followed by pride in ‘sports’ (averaging .64, between .49 and .73).

There was a second group of countries with loadings on the Cultural Pride factor being strongest for pride in ‘science’ (average loading was .68, between .62 to .75), typically still followed by pride in ‘arts and literature’ (average was .64, between .61 to .67). Pride in ‘sports’ typically followed (average .58, between .57, to .65), with pride in ‘armed forces’ (average .49, between .37 to .60) or pride in ‘history’ (average .53, between .45 to .61) coming in last. This group consisted of Belgium, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, and South Africa.

However, correlations of the Cultural Pride were often in the opposite direction to what was anticipated, or close to zero. We believe Cultural Pride may be a construct which is highly sensitive to contextual factors (e.g., differing histories, differing emphasis on sports or arts and so on) and to the number of cultures within a country (the items implicitly assume a mono-cultural society). This contextual and cultural sensitivity complicates a valid measurement of Cultural Pride for within a country and across countries.

We chose not to pursue further psychometric testing for the Cultural Pride scale and conclude it has relatively poor psychometric properties.

Political Pride

We decided to examine the Political Pride construct in isolation. The fit indices of a one-factor political pride scale indicated a good or acceptable fit across 19 countries with acceptable loadings. For many countries item PP1 (“proud of the way democracy works”) had the highest loading on the Political Pride factor.

Table 9

Fit Statistics for Single-Group CFAs Assuming a One-Factor Model for Political Pride

Correlations between residuals were all very low (under .10) for countries with an acceptable fit for the model. The pooled fit indices are reported here (χ²(2) = 634.644, p < .001, CFI = .985, RMSEA = .092, SRMR = .020).

All countries with good fit indices for Political Pride had acceptable standardized factor loadings (at or above .30 rounded to 2dp). The most common pattern by far was the pride in ‘democracy’ item having the highest loading on the Political Pride factor (average loading was .76, between .62 and .87), followed by the pride in ‘political influence’ item (average loading was .67, between .55 and .85). Pride in ‘social security system’ (average .59, between .45 and .82) or ‘fair treatment of all groups’ (average .58, between .46 and .76) came in last for these countries (Croatia, Finland, France, Georgia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK, and the US).

A somewhat different pattern was observed for Norway, Slovakia, and Spain. For Norway, pride in ‘political influence’ was strongest (.67) with pride in ‘democracy’ coming second (.63). For Slovakia, pride in ‘social security system’ was equal with pride in ‘democracy’ (.67), followed by pride in ‘political influence’, then pride in ‘fair treatment of all groups’. Finally, for Spain, all loadings were relatively low (between .50 and .54) with pride in ‘democracy’ still strongest, followed by pride in ‘social security system’ and then the remaining items both at .50.

Objectivity

The dataset we used was collected via a combination of self-report and trained interviewers. Standardized formats and instructions were provided to ensure the objectivity of the application. The objectivity of the scoring and interpretation were ensured via the use of clear coding schemes for missing or ambiguous responses, ordered and labelled response options, the scoring procedure, and the country-specific statistics (appendix, table 15).

Reliability

We report two reliability statistics obtained using Revelle’s (2013) psych package. These indicators suggest the Political Pride scale has good internal consistency. Cronbach’s alpha indicated reliability was acceptable to good (α = .60 to .83), as did McDonald’s omega (ω = .63 to .85). Below we report on scale reliabilities country by country. The results indicate that the Political Pride scale appears to have good internal consistency.

Table 10

Reliability Statistics for the Political Pride Scale

Validity

In this section, we outline the evidence for the content validity, factorial validity, and nomological validity evidence for the Political Pride scale.

Factorial Validity

We found good evidence for 19 countries that the Political Pride items load onto a single factor. The 1-factor structure models had a good fit in these countries, loadings were acceptable, and followed similar patterns across 16 of these countries with the item about pride in one’s country for “the way democracy works” being the strongest item, followed by pride in one’s country’s “political influence” as the second or third strongest loading item (Croatia, Finland, France, Georgia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK, and the US).

Content Validity

In terms of content validity, Political Pride is a relatively new construct in the literature, and its exact components are not yet well understood. To our knowledge this sequence (or similar) of ISSP items form the only existing Political Pride scale. Furthermore, the items were not originally developed to measure Political Pride, but rather ‘domain-specific’ or ‘grounded’ National Pride. That said, given Meitinger’s (2018) web-probing findings about the General National Pride item, it would seem these ISSP items do cover several topics respondents think about when responding to the General National Pride item.

Nomological Network

Given the existing literature, we anticipated that Political Pride scores would have a weak positive correlation with the General National Pride item, and a weak positive correlation with the Cultural Pride items. We expected negative correlations (weak) with the immigrant prejudice items and with (endorsement of) an ethnic criterion for membership (to the nation). In other words, based on the findings of Hjerm (2003) and Ariely (2011), we expected Political Pride to be unpinned by humanistic values as opposed to more nationalistic values, and that this would be reflected in higher scorers on Political Pride having more tolerance for immigrants and being less likely to endorse an ethnic criterion for membership to the nation. We note here that these last two scales, to our knowledge, have not been validated but do appear to have good face validity for measuring immigrant prejudice or negative attitudes about immigration, and (endorsement of) an ethnic criterion for membership to the nation.

Since many authors have theorised or found evidence that Political Pride has a different underlying ideological background to Cultural Pride (see Hjerm, 2003; Ariely, 2011; Lubbers & Smeekes, 2022), we expected to find only weak positive correlation between the two constructs. At this stage there is no clear consensus on whether Political Pride and Cultural Pride (when adequately measured) will load onto a general factor of National Pride. We chose to include Cultural Pride scores as a correlate for Political Pride, but note that much like the General Pride Item, there is reason to believe that this correlation will not be especially informative given our evidence that the Cultural Pride scale does not adequately assess Cultural Pride for most countries, and the construct may be highly context dependent. 

As Lubbers and Smeekes (2022) found a positive correlation between Cultural Pride items and far-right ideologies (in a mostly Western European sample), we expected that Political Pride (as a more humanistic form of National Pride, see Hjerm, 2003) may be weakly associated with gender. Immerzeel and colleagues (2013) found that males are somewhat more likely than females to vote for far-right wing parties in two of the three countries that overlap between our sample and theirs (where there was a sufficient sample size) around the same time period. We anticipate being male may be very weakly related to having lower Political Pride. With age we had no reason to expect a relationship with Political Pride.

We now present the correlates of the Political Pride scale and discuss the results in country specific contexts below.

Table 11

Country-Specific and Mean Correlates of the Political Pride Scale

Note. ***. Correlation is significant at the p < .001 level (2-tailed)

**. Correlation is significant at the p <.01 level (2-tailed)

*. Correlation is significant at the p <.05 level (2-tailed)

Gender was coded with male = 1, female = 2.

Gender was typically unrelated to Political Pride. In Switzerland higher Political Pride was very weakly associated with being male, whereas for Norway and Sweden it was weakly associated with being female. Being older was often weakly associated with higher Political Pride. We contrasted a linear model of this relationship with a quadratic model, to see if this relationship varies at different ages using the pooled dataset. While the quadratic model was a better fit than the linear model, the change in the R squared value was negligible (less than .01).

Cultural Pride items had a moderate positive correlation with Political Pride. According to Hjerm (2003), Political Pride and Cultural Pride have distinct underlying causes. The poor psychometric properties of the Cultural Pride scale in most of the above countries means it is difficult to interpret what this association means more practically. Among the pooled sample (19 countries), we saw significant positive correlations between Political Pride scores and each of the Cultural Pride items, with item CP5 (scientific and technological) being the strongest correlate (r = .43, p <.001), followed by item CP8 (armed forces) (r =.31, p < .001). All other correlations were significant (p < .001) and positive but moderate-weak (see appendix, table 16).

We also correlated each item in the Political Pride scale with each item in the Cultural Pride scale (appendix table 17). Here, the largest item to item correlation was between PP3 (social security) and CP5 (scientific and technological) (r = .36, p <.001). Other item correlations between Political Pride items and Cultural Pride items varied between r = .12 to .33, p <.001) with CP5 (scientific and technological) tending to have the strongest correlations. This may not be applicable at the country level, but these pooled item level correlations indicate that pride in one’s country’s ‘scientific and technological achievements’ may be driving the higher-than-expected correlation between the Political Pride scale and the Cultural Pride items. That said, the correlation between Political Pride scores and the Cultural Pride scores is low enough in each country, that despite the limitations of using the Cultural Pride scale as a correlate, it does indicate evidence of discriminant validity for the Political Pride scale.

The General Pride item is also known to have many issues. One issue that is especially relevant for our analysis is that Meitinger’s (2018) web probing study found participants sometimes thought about Cultural Pride type content or about Political Pride type content when responding to the general item.

That said, the moderate positive association between Political Pride and General National Pride still provides evidence of nomological validity. We did expect a correlation of this direction and magnitude.

Immigrant prejudice items were related to Political Pride in almost all countries, but the relationship varied in strength and direction. For Croatia, Japan, and Mexico, higher Political Pride was weakly associated with lower scores on the immigrant prejudice items. For the remaining countries, (excluding Spain, Switzerland, and the US) we observed weak positive correlations between Political Pride and immigrant prejudice, with France having a moderate positive correlation. These correlations were not in the expected direction, given the existing literature (Hjerm, 2003; Ariely, 2011). Endorsement of an ethnic criterion for membership to the nation was typically positively associated with Political Pride, except for France (weak negative relationship) and Finland, Israel, and Norway (no relationship). This was also unexpected and does give some indication that the theoretical underpinnings of Political Pride may not hold in all countries. Generally speaking, immigrant prejudice and ethnic criterion for membership correlated with Political Pride in the same direction as each other within each nation.

There is fair evidence for the nomological validity of the Political Pride scale. Although we note, some expected correlates appear to be context dependent. Both immigrant prejudice and ethnic criterion for membership were related to Political Pride in almost all countries, but the direction of these relationships varies country to country. For the 16 countries (Croatia, Finland, France, Georgia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK, and the US) with similar factor loading patterns, 6 (Georgia, Ireland, Philippines, Russia, Sweden, and the UK) had correlations all in the same direction, and an additional 3 (Finland, Spain, and the US) had most correlations in the same direction, with one non-significant correlation (ignoring minor correlates like age and sex). Although these 9 have some correlations in the opposite direction to the existing literature, they follow similar patterns to each other. It is possible that differences in construct content could be partly driven by the degree of cultural heterogeneity in different nations and by how salient this is in public discourse.  We speculate that some of the items in the scale

Correlations with Cultural Pride scores (and items) and with the General National Pride item were in consistently in the expected direction. Overall, we treat this as evidence of the discriminant validity of the Political Pride scale, however, there may be cause for further investigations at the item level to improve construct clarity and to account for the role of country context at the item level. We see some indication that the Cultural Pride item CP5 (pride in country’s scientific and technological achievements) may be a strong correlate for Political Pride, but we did not investigate whether this finding in the pooled sample generalizes at the country level.

In summary, there is sufficient evidence to conclude the Political Pride items are measuring a one-factor latent construct in these 19 countries. However, there is also evidence to indicate the nature of this construct is context dependent. We explore this via Measurement Invariance testing below.

Descriptive statistics (scaling)

Below we provide the country-specific descriptive statistics of the Political Pride scale scores.

Table 12

Country Specific Scale Statistics for Political Pride

Further quality criteria

We investigated Measurement Invariance. We ran multi-group CFA models across 19 countries for the Political Pride scale (Croatia, Finland, France, Georgia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK, and the US). We compared three different models to test for configural invariance, metric invariance, and scalar invariance (Leitgöb et al., 2023).

Configural invariance was met (CFI = .974, RMSEA = .102, SRMR = .024), and item loadings were all significant, although the RMSEA value is borderline. However, as expected, invariance requirements for the metric model (CFI = .955, RMSEA = .086, SRMR = .046) were not met when including all 19 countries. According to Chen (2007), when delta CFI difference between models is less than .01 we can assume metric invariance holds, but this was not the case here.

Table 13

Model Fit Statistics for Measurement Invariance – Political Pride

Further literature

Several researchers have used the ISSP domain-specific national pride scale as a single scale. Lubbers and Smeekes (2022), Solt (2011), and Smith and Kim (2006) all used ISSP domain-specific National Pride items to form a single scale. Similarly, Bruinsma and Mußotter (2023) factor analysed the whole ISSP National Identity model. All domain-specific items loaded strongly onto the second factor, which they titled ‘National Pride and Attachment’.

Likewise, several previous authors have used similar combinations of these domain-specific National Pride items to tap into the constructs of Nationalism and Patriotism (e.g., Davidov, 2009; Fleiß et al., 2009). Mußotter (2021) challenges the Content Validity of Ariely (2011), Davidov (2009), Fleiß and colleagues (2009) measurement models of Patriotism and Nationalism, and comments on the potential construct overlap between the two. CFA results for German ISSP data supported a single factor structure for Patriotism (various Political Pride items), but Nationalism results were more mixed, possibly partly due to the different items each paper used. Only Davidov (2009) used similar items to the present study to measure Political Pride but omitted pride in ‘political influence’. Mußotter (2021) also points out how context/country could change respondents’ interpretation of these items. Mußotter (2021) concludes there is a disconnect between the conceptualization and measurement of Patriotism and Nationalism in the literature, and that domain-specific pride items most likely measure National Pride instead.

Hjerm (2003) also examined the relationship between Cultural Pride and Political Pride with Nationalism and Patriotism, treating the four variables as distinct constructs, but found that the relationships tended to differ by country. National Identity researchers are actively debating the definitions and measurement of Nationalism and Patriotism (see Mußotter, 2021 and others), so we chose not to use these two constructs as part of our nomological network for Cultural Pride and Political Pride.