Description
How does thinking about your country's past--the good or the bad--affect how you feel about your country? This paper examines whether nostalgia for a national past influences political opinions and attitudes in the present. In particular, we are interested in whether reflecting on one’s country’s past in a positive or negative light affects the extent to which individuals feel an attachment to the country, as well as whether they support teaching both the positives and negatives of their country’s past to future generations. This paper test these claims in Germany, Britain, and the United States via three survey experiments. Our research offers theoretical and empirical implications for political science and memory studies.
