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. 2021 Jan;60(1):171-195.
doi: 10.1111/bjso.12386. Epub 2020 Jun 7.

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

Tom Nijs  1 , Borja Martinovic  1 , Maykel Verkuyten  1 , Constantine Sedikides  2
Affiliations

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

Tom Nijs et al. Br J Soc Psychol. 2021 Jan.

Abstract

Political campaign slogans, such as 'Take back control of our country' (United Kingdom Independence Party) and 'The Netherlands ours again' (Dutch Party for Freedom), indicate that right-wing populism appeals to the belief that the country is 'ours', and therefore, 'we' have the exclusive right to determine what happens. We examined this sense of ownership of the country (i.e. collective psychological ownership [CPO]) with the related determination right in relation to exclusionary attitudes and voting behaviour. Among Dutch (Study 1, N = 572) and British (Study 2, N = 495) participants, we found that CPO explained anti-immigrant and anti-EU attitudes, and these attitudes in turn accounted for voting 'leave' in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the British sample (Study 2). Additionally, CPO was more strongly related to negative immigrant attitudes among right-wing Dutch participants, whereas it was more strongly related to negative EU attitudes and voting 'leave' among left-wing British participants. CPO contributes to the understanding of critical contemporary social attitudes and political behaviour.

Keywords: Brexit referendum; anti-EU attitudes; anti-immigrant attitudes; collective psychological ownership; exclusive determination right.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Standardized coefficients of the main paths of the final structural equation model in Study 1 (N = 572). Included control variables were not reported. *p < .05; ***p < .001.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Simple slopes from the interaction between political ideology and exclusive determination right on immigrant minority attitudes in Study 1. Low determination right is 1 standard deviation below the mean of exclusive determination right (−1) and high determination right is 1 standard deviation above the mean (1). The Y‐axis represents the standardized scale of the latent dependent variable.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Standardized coefficients of the main paths of the final structural equation model in Study 2 (N = 495). Included control variables were not reported. *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Simple slopes for the interaction between political ideology and CPO on European integration attitudes in Study 2. Low CPO is 1 Standard Deviation below the mean of CPO (−1) and high CPO is 1 Standard Deviation above the mean (1).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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