Right-wing opposition to criticism of the imperial past is stronger than left-wing support.
European colonial empires had outsized roles in European and world history. We might therefore expect that Europeans have strong views of their national pasts – whether nostalgic or critical. Yet we have little understanding of opinion about empire because attitudes to empire have not been considered in studies of European political behaviour and public opinion. We address this gap for the first time by providing a theoretical framework for understanding how attitudes to empire become politically salient, measuring imperial nostalgia in a British panel survey, examining the links between nostalgia and voting intentions, and testing the effects of MPs’ pro- versus anti-empire positions in a conjoint experiment.
Theoretically, we argue that empires play important roles in collective memories in post-imperial metropoles. These collective memories become politically salient through collective nostalgia, which links understandings of the past to contemporary political choices. We then measure imperial nostalgia using two original batteries fielded in a British panel study, finding that attitudes and emotions to empire form clear dimensions of opinion that are distinct from related concepts like general nostalgia, authoritarianism, nationalism, and immigration attitudes.
Turning to its potential consequences, we find that imperial nostalgia has strong associations with party evaluations and vote intentions, rivalling or exceeding the predictive power of established attitudinal dimensions such as immigration opinion, authoritarian values, and left–right ideology. This is particularly striking given that empire is not a prominent theme in contemporary political campaigns.
British Journal of Political Science, vol 55