Presented at Nations and Nationalisms Conference, Loughborough University

What is the relationship between global and local identification, and how is it linked to political conflict? These questions are central to scholarship on contemporary electoral politics, which has linked the radical right’s rise to a new dimension of political conflict that sets liberal, globally minded voters against socially conservative, locally oriented ones. This hypothesized cleavage, variously described as cosmopolitan–parochial, globalist–nationalist, and universalist–particularist, implies that collective identification is polarized along a universalist–particularist axis and that these differences drive political mobilization. Yet little is known about how territorial identities at different scales compete with or reinforce each other, let alone how their configurations connect to political preferences. This study investigates patterns of multiple collective identification and their relation to electoral politics using latent class analysis and data from cross-national attitude surveys. Evidence from the United Kingdom suggests that the identity-based division of electorates into cosmopolitans and nationalists does not accurately reflect actual patterns of collective identification. Rather than being mutually exclusive and antagonistic, particularistic and expansive sources of identity typically co-occur, albeit with different levels of support. Notably, the latent class that most strongly emphasizes expansive identities does so while simultaneously showing strong national identification. This challenges assumptions about the polarization of territorial identities and its role in contemporary electoral cleavages.