Official Nationalism Online: Contemporary Lessons from India and China

Political leaders in democracies and dictatorships use nationalism to build bases of support. How – and why – do leaders use online platforms to promote nationalistic claims? How do nationalistic claims affect political support for leaders with authoritarian tendencies? Many scholars emphasize nationalism’s power to exclude outsiders, coerce subjects, or demonize opponents. In contrast, I theorize nationalism as a strategy of co-optation. I test my theory by comparing official nationalism India and China. I find that leaders use nationalistic claims to recruit citizen allies through online platforms – and that recruited allies include minority groups like Muslims. I combine computational analyses of large text data, qualitative case studies of political mobile Apps, with online survey experiments. My findings show when official nationalism travels across countries. My comparative approach can be applied to studying other influential ideologies.