The Causes and Consequences of Territorial Nationalism

Abstract

Scholars have long pondered why states fight more often over territory than over any other issue. Many existing explanations appeal to domestic political incentives: nationalist sentiment motivates domestic audiences to punish leaders who dare to give ground on disputed territory. Nevertheless, the power of the mass public's beliefs to constrain leaders on territorial disputes remains unclear. Why do people care so deeply about territorial disputes that are often too far away to affect them? What prevents elites from manipulating the public's attitudes about these issues at will, and to what extent are people prepared to mobilize against their leaders over such distant concerns?

This dissertation seeks to understand why people feel such strong attachments to territorial claims and how far they are willing to go to hold leaders accountable on territorial causes. In Chapter 1, I use existing and original survey data to show that territorial attachments are grounded in psychological needs for ontological security and in-group superiority: since territorial borders become symbolic of the boundaries of the national in-group, territorial changes threaten both the stability of group boundaries and the group's status relative to out-groups.

Chapter 2 then tests how susceptible territorial attachments are to manipulation and how much they shape voting behavior. Using face-to-face survey experiments in India, I show that Indians' attitudes toward Kashmir generally resist leaders' attempts to moderate them. At the same time, the electoral impact of the Kashmir issue, while statistically significant, is easily overshadowed by candidate characteristics like party affiliation and religion, and is no greater than the influence of issues like household subsidies where leaders often defy electoral incentives in their policies.

Chapter 3 widens the aperture to the rest of the world, using cross-national observational data to examine the relationship between territorial concessions and leaders' political survival. I recover suggestive evidence that the political consequences of territorial concessions can depend on electoral timing: concessions are more politically damaging if undertaken after more time has passed since an election. Overall, however, the association between territorial concessions and leaders losing office is strikingly weak.

These findings raise profound questions about the bedrock assumptions underlying current understandings of territorial conflict. Although territorial attitudes are deep-seated and hard to change, territorial disputes—even highly salient ones—may take a back seat to other issues when people have to prioritize. Consequently, territorial compromise may not be as politically costly as leaders (and scholars) often assume.