🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates how long-term seismic risk shapes national identity, distinguishing for the first time between its distributive (resource-dependence) and expressive (emotional attachment) dimensions. Integrating World Values Survey data with subnational seismic risk measures, the authors employ spatial matching, panel regressions, and quasi-experimental designs embedded within a social interaction theoretical framework. They find that residents in high-risk areas exhibit significantly stronger national pride, willingness to fight for their country, and in-group prioritization—but only in institutional contexts where the state and religion are highly aligned. Short-term seismic events show no general effect, influencing only older, less mobile populations. The findings reveal that persistent, unavoidable environmental threats shape national identity through mechanisms moderated by institutional and religious contexts.
📝 Abstract
This paper studies how long-run earthquake risk shapes national identity, separating a distributive margin (national membership as a rule for allocating scarce resources) from an expressive margin (pride, willingness to fight, and affective attachment). Linking World Values Survey respondents (1981-2022; 63 countries, 494 subnational regions) to subnational seismic-risk geography, I find that people living closer to high-risk zones express stronger national in-group orientation: more pride, more willingness to fight, and more priority for nationals when jobs are scarce. Family attachment and out-group hostility do not rise, while religiosity increases in parallel. The expressive margin is conditional: the pride response is pronounced where state-religion alignment and a cohesive religious field lend the symbolic infrastructure to cast disaster as a shared national ordeal, and indistinguishable from zero where they do not. A complementary design exploiting earthquakes between adjacent survey waves finds no average short-run response, yet the response it does detect concentrates among older, place-attached residents who cannot leave -- consistent with attitudes tracking a chronic, inescapable risk rather than single events. Together, the results point to a demand-side origin of national attachment: where a covariate shock would overwhelm local and family insurance, people turn to larger communities of protection and meaning -- the nation and religion -- a logic I formalize in a simple social-interaction model.