The Influence of Local Patriotism on Participation in Local Politics, Civic participation, Trust in Local Government and Collective Action

Abstract

Patriotism is conceived of as a national-level concept. I posit that people hold similarly strong feelings toward their municipal area. Based on long-standing the- ories of patriotism in national politics, I show how local patriotism influences local politics. Using novel preregistered survey data from an online sample matched to nationally representative data in terms of gender, age, and race, I show that people have feelings of love, indifference, or hate toward their municipality. I also find a strong positive correlation between loving one’s municipality and partici-pation in local politics, civic participation, and trust in local government. I also conducted two preregistered survey experiments that show that priming feelings of love and/or hate towards one’s town strongly motivates the willingness to sac-rifice to solve local collective action problems. Specifically, stimuli that evoked these feelings made participants much more likely to donate the payment they earned from completing the survey to solve a town problem. These results show the crucial importance of local patriotism for understanding local politics.