Political Ethnocentrism in the New America: An Abstract

In the current geopolitical environment, we are witnessing a resurgence of political leaders who encourage higher levels of patriotism, nationalism, and ethnocentrism from their constituents. This political evolution has increased interest in studying the consumer ethnocentrism concept. While most studies on the concept focus on the preference for domestic goods and services over foreign ones, we extend the concept to the context of “human brands,” which are any well-known personalities who are the subject of marketing communication efforts (Thomson, 2006). Viewing political candidates (as products) in the United States, we explore preferences for natural-born citizen candidates over naturalized citizen candidates (i.e. citizens who were born in the country vs. citizens who immigrated and then attained citizenship). In this research, we first adapt Shimp and Sharma’s (1987) consumer-ethnocentrism scale to the political context i.e. changing items such as “American people should always buy American-made products instead of imports” to “American people should always vote for American-born candidates instead of foreign-born candidates,” and then use expert judges to determine face-validity based on the given definition of political ethnocentrism. We then adopt the scale-development procedure (Gerbing & Anderson, 1981) to determine the reliability and validity of the political ethnocentrism scale. Next, we examine what antecedents determine the political-ethnocentricity of a political constituency. Testing via structural equations modeling, we find that social-conservatism (desire to maintain “traditional values”) and religiosity are highly positively associated with political ethnocentrism, while consumer-cosmopolitanism (openness to cultural experiences other than one’s own) is highly negatively related with political ethnocentrism. We also find that in the United States, those who self-identify as republicans display significantly higher levels of political ethnocentrism than their counterparts who identify as democrats. Guidelines for candidates running for office, based on the findings, are also presented.