Measuring National Parochialism and Explaining Its Individual Variations Using Survey Data

National parochialism has attracted academic attention as its negative consequences have become increasingly apparent in the globalizing world. To empirically approach this issue, previous studies measured national parochialism employing experimental methods. The present study introduces a new approach using self-reported survey data. The advantages of using self-reported survey data lie in the access to a greater number of observations in a wider variety of countries with rich socioeconomic and demographic background information. Specifically, we use questions asking the respondents about the closeness to one’s country and the closeness to the world in the World Values Survey and European Values Survey and define their difference as national parochialism. Using this measure, we assess its validity and investigate the sources of the individual variations. Our main results and contributions are as follows. First, our measure of national parochialism is compatible with the ones in experimental studies. Second, we confirm the findings in the previous studies that national parochialism correlates with sex, educational level, and political ideology, with some cross-country variations. Third, we add new findings to the literature that national parochialism correlates with native status, age, marital status, income class, employment status, as well as both mother’s and father’s native statuses and educational levels, with the tendency that people in the socially insecure position are more parochial. We also uncover that the COVID-19 pandemic raised the level of national parochialism. These results point to both the scope and limitation of policy intervention for managing parochialism at the population level.