key: cord-0748468-zzb15b6i
authors: Lim, Sijeong; Prakash, Aseem
title: Pandemics and citizen perceptions about their country: Did COVID‐19 increase national pride in South Korea?
date: 2021-06-06
journal: Nations Natl
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12749
sha: 25f10521d0ba00628096f4f5ba6ec8168506dae2
doc_id: 748468
cord_uid: zzb15b6i

Exogenous shocks such as pandemics have a profound influence on how citizens think about their country. We explore how the successful handling of COVID‐19 shaped South Korean citizens' perception of their country. Empirically, we compare data from surveys conducted in August 2019 and April 2020. Using regression on matched samples, we find a significant increase in general national pride. More importantly, we find an increase in positive assessments of their country in domains directly related to the COVID‐19 response (civic awareness and international leadership) but not in domains less directly related to the pandemic. We also find that while Koreans take pride in their collective response to the crisis, their disenchantment with the political class has grown. The implication is that citizens offer a remarkably nuanced understanding of how the COVID‐19 response reflected the strengths of the Korean society, as opposed to the Korean political system.

Exogenous shocks such as national disasters and pandemics have a profound influence on how citizens think about the virtues and failings of their country and society. Scholars suggest that governance failures in response to such shocks cause social disruptions and undermine the government's credibility (Omelicheva, 2011) . The 1918 flu contributed to the 1920 election of Republican Warren Harding to the US presidency, who campaigned on a 'return to normalcy' (Deverell, 2020) . The 1943 Bengal famine helped the Indian Freedom movement highlight the British government's failures in India (Mukherjee, 2015) . President George W. Bush's poor handling of the rescue efforts during Hurricane Katrina may have contributed to the massive defeat of the Republican party in the 2008 elections (Malhotra & Kuo, 2008) .

But does the successful handing of exogenous shocks enhance trust in government and society, and more broadly, encourage citizens to take pride in their country? The discussion on the nexus between the handling of exogenous shocks and national pride is particularly relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was significant variation in the effectiveness of how countries tackled this global-scale health crisis. And, more than ever before, citizens across the world had easy access to cross-country information on infections and mortality, often amplified on social and traditional media, which compared and contrasted their country's performance with that of others. 1 How the pandemic affects national pride is also expected to vary by the sociocultural context of countries and, within a country, by individual-level attributes such as political values and attitudes.

In this research note, we explore how the national response to COVID-19 has affected national pride in South Korea (Korea hereafter), which is widely celebrated for its pandemic response. The director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, urged countries to 'apply the lessons learned in Korea and elsewhere' (Fisher & Choe, 2020) . Some international leaders sought to proclaim their association with Korea. Maryland's Governor Larry Hogan bragged that because he is known as Korea's 'son-in-law' (he is married to a Korean), he was able to quickly secure COVID-19 help from Korea (Hogan, 2020) . A Pew survey reports 86% of Koreans believe that their country handled the crisis well, but only 47% for the United States. 2 It is thus reasonable to expect that how well a country has managed the COVID-19 crisis should affect the level of pride citizens feel about their country.

Of course, even if we find that COVID-19 is associated with the rise or fall of national pride, it is not clear whether the COVID-19 crisis has been the primary cause of the surge or drop in national pride. In Korea, alongside COVID-19, there were other recent events that could have shaped national pride including the on-going trade dispute with a long-time international rival, Japan, or the Oscar-winning Korean film, Parasite. Also, in fall 2019, the country was rocked by the high-profile corruption scandal involving Justice Minister Nominee Cho Kuk (Lee, 2019) . The scandal was a blow to the progressive administration of Moon Jae-in, a former human rights lawyer who came into power after the impeachment of the former president Park Geun-hye over corruption and abuse of power. Such multifaceted and countervailing drivers of national pride make South Korea a particularly interesting case for investigation.

To empirically assess the relationship between the COVID-19 response and national pride, we draw on a unique dataset of surveys conducted by Korea Research in August 2019 and April 2020 (during COVID-19).

These surveys asked two general questions about national pride: 'I am proud of being a Korean' and 'I want to be reborn as a Korean (in my next life).' We expect both measures of national pride to be higher in April 2020 than in August 2019. To gain additional confidence that the pride increase is attributable to COVID-19 and to explore which causal mechanism might be behind the observed association between COVID-19 and pride, we also examine changes in pride in specific domains: (1) civic awareness of citizens, (2) international leadership, (3) economic competitiveness, (4) popular culture and (5) politics and democracy.

More specifically, we identify two alternative mechanisms through which the pandemic might affect national pride. The first is the socio-psychological mechanism of 'rally-round-the-flag'. An exogenous crisis, in this case, an imported virus, can breed uncertainty-driven anxiety as well as ingroup-outgroup thinking, which then leads the public to turn to their government and identify more strongly with their nation in general (Bieber, 2020; Schraff, 2020) .

If so, we expect increase in national pride across all five domains between August 2019 and April 2020.

The second is the rational evaluation mechanism where citizens assess their country's handling of the crisis and update their belief of actors and domains that contributed to the success. The resulting change in perception would capture the change in what Fabrykant and Magun (2016) refer to as objectively 'grounded national pride'. If so, we expect to see different degrees of change in pride across different domains. We should see an increase in pride in domains most directly related to the COVID-19 response but not in others. The most significant increase is expected in the domain of civic mindedness of citizens. Citizens' compliance with self-quarantine mandates and the voluntary use of facemasks in public spaces were key to successfully managing the COVID-19 crisis. International leadership is another domain that Koreans are expected to take pride in. The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) shared its quarantine strategies with foreign countries, and Korean companies donated test kits and masks to foreign countries struggling with the virus, all of which received positive media attention. The expectation for the politics and democracy domain is less clear cut; although the government quickly enacted policies on testing and prevention, the countervailing force of the corruption scandal must have made rational citizens reduce their pride in this domain (Ferrier & Hwang, 2020) .

To preview, we find a significant increase in the general measures of national pride between 2019 and 2020.

Furthermore, citizens' pride increased substantially in civic awareness, followed by international leadership. There was no meaningful change in pride in the domain popular culture and economic competitiveness, and Koreans across the ideological spectrum are increasingly less proud of their politics and democracy even as they show a heightened pride in the ability of the Korean people in handling the pandemic. These domain-specific analyses together suggest that taking pride in the successful COVID-19 response was not merely the result of a 'rally-round-the-flag' effect. Koreans recognise the uniqueness of the COVID-19 challenge and offer a remarkably rational and nuanced interpretation of their country's successful handling of the crisis. They view it as a victory for the Korean nation as opposed to the Korean state.

Although a longitudinal study examining within-participant change would have been ideal to investigate how COVID-19 changed national pride among citizens, we unfortunately do not have such data. Instead, our empirical strategy is to compare the level of national pride between two time points using cross-sectional surveys conducted before (August 2019) and during (April 2020) the COVID-19 crisis. We examine how the change in the level of national pride during the period under study reflects the handling of the pandemic by carefully accounting for confounding factors that might have shaped national pride in the same period.The August 2019 data come from two separate surveys. The first survey conducted from 9 to 12 August 2019 (N = 1000) includes the two general national In a regression framework, our independent variable, COVID-19, takes the value of 1 for all responses collected in April 2020 and 0 otherwise. The aforementioned general and domain-specific pride measures are our dependent variables. Our expectation is that all else held equal, there would be an increase in general national pride between August 2019 and April 2020 or a significant and positive COVID-19 effect. We also employ domain-specific measures of pride as our dependent variables. These measures help us account for the confounding effects of other events such as the escalation of the trade war with Japan ongoing since July 2019 3 and the historic Oscar win of the Korean film Parasite in February 2020 . The domain specific pride measures also allow us to conduct the test of two mechanisms (social-psychological vs. rational) liking the pandemic to national pride.

Our analysis also controls demographic and socio-economic variables, namely, age, gender, level of education, level of income and residence (at the provincial level). We also include a measure of the respondents' political ideology. We are particularly interested in how political ideology might condition the effect of COVID-19 given the country's political context shaped by competition between two major parties, the progressive ruling party and the conservative opposition party. Table 1 summarises our main findings. We conduct a weighted regression analysis on the matched dataset. We performed exact matching based on the following binary/categorical covariates: gender, age, progressive/conservative/ moderate, college education, income and region. See Table A1 Table A2 reports the results from using the full sample (n = 2000) of the unmatched dataset. Our findings are largely the same.

The COVID-19 variable positively correlates with the two general pride measures (Models 1 and 2). The substantive effect of COVID-19 is visualised in Figure 1 in terms of predicted probabilities. All other covariates are set at sample average values. The vertical line on each bar indicates 95% confidence intervals. The probability that one feels proud of being Korean increased from under 70% in August 2019 to over 80% in April 2020. Similarly, the probability that one wants to be reborn as a Korean increased from around 56% in 2019 to over 70% in 2020.

We move on to exploring domain-specific pride measures. The socio-psychological mechanism expects an increase in pride across all five domains. The rational mechanism predicts an increase in pride only in domains that are relevant to COVID-19 experience. Figure 2 visualises the finding from Models 3-7. We plot the predicted probabilities of choosing 'upper-middle' or 'upper' positions (scores of 4 and 5 on the ordinal scale) in pre-COVID-19 (red bars) and during COVID-19 (blue bars), respectively, with 95% confidence intervals.

Consistent with our expectation, the most dramatic improvement is observed in the domain of citizenship (Model 3), followed by international leadership (Model 4), the two pride domains directly related to COVID-19. We observe a 15%-point improvement (from 37% to 52%) in the citizenship domain and over a 10%-point improvement in the international leadership domain. This is consistent with the rational mechanism.

As for the domain of economic competitiveness (economy), we do not observe any significant change in citizen perception (Model 5). This might be explained by two countervailing forces shaping citizen perception of this domain.

On the one hand, the ongoing trade war with a long-time international rival, Japan, could serve as a force that boosts national pride via the rally effect (Hwang et al., 2018; Seitz & Zazzaro, 2020) . On the other hand, most countries' economies, including the Korean economy, experienced a downturn due to the pandemic; the growth rate in the first quarter of 2020 was À1.4%, the lowest since the 2008 financial crisis (Jun, 2020) . Thus economic concerns could have undermined the public's confidence in the national economy. Note: Cutpoint estimates for ordered models (Models 3-7) and province fixed effect estimates are not reported to save space.

*p < 0.05. **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

although respondents attribute the successful pandemic management to the Korean nation, especially in the high civic awareness of fellow citizens, they show growing dissatisfaction towards the political class over the affairs of the Korean state.

In Table 2 we explore how the change in national pride might vary according to the political ideology of the respondent. All models in Table 2 include the interaction terms between COVID-19 and the two ideology variables, progressive and conservative. In the general pride models (Models 8-9), the interaction term coefficient is positive at the significance level of 5%, suggesting that the positive COVID-19 effect is more pronounced among progressive citizens (the likely supporters of the progressive ruling government) than among moderate/centrist citizens (the reference category). Figure 3 visualises the ideology-varying effect of COVID-19 in terms of predicted probabilities with 95% confidence intervals. Indeed, the COVID-19 effect, captured by the height difference between the blue and red bars, is strongest for the progressives. But, at the same time, we also see a substantial increase in general pride among conservatives in Model 8 (proud to be Korean). Note: Cutpoint estimates for ordered models (Models 10-14) and province fixed effect estimates are not reported to save space. *p < 0.05. **p < 0.01. ***p < 0.001.

We turn now to how citizens' political ideology might condition the effect of COVID-19 on the domain-specific measures of national pride (Models 10-14). We visualise in Figure 4 the predicted probabilities based on the citizenship and international leadership models (Models 10 and 11), which are the two domains we expect to be associated with the COVID-19 experience. Figure 4 reveals that, as for the citizenship domain, the conservatives' assessment improves more than either progressives or moderates. In the pre-crisis period, only 27% of the Korean conservatives positioned their country in the upper-middle or upper rank in this domain. The share rose to around 51% in April 2020. The change is positive yet smaller for progressives. As a result, we see convergence across ideological groups on Korea's global standing in the domain of civic awareness: the gap between the progressives and conservatives is much smaller in April 2020 (61%-51% = 10%) compared with that in August 2019 (48%-27%

= 21%). This result suggests that COVID-19 has brought the country together, at least on how various groups take pride in the civic-mindedness of Koreans.

As for international leadership, similar to the case of general national pride, the improvement in assessment is more pronounced among progressive citizens. This outcome might be because citizens associate this domain at least in part with the COVID-19 diplomacy of the government, and thus, the assessment reflects the respondents' support for the incumbent. In (Figure A1 ), we also report the predicted probabilities based on Model 14 (politics); the downward shift in the assessment in this domain is observed across all ideology groups, but is relatively more pronounced among conservative citizens.

Our research note has important implications for the study of national identity in times of crisis, COVID-19 in our case. We show that the successful handling of a global health crisis is associated with an increase in citizens' national pride. By looking separately at domain specific period, we also show that the increase in pride is observed only in the domains more directly related to the successful handling of COVID-19. Although Koreans have become much more proud of their fellow citizens' civic-mindedness and their nation's international leadership, their perception of national economy and popular culture hardly changed, and pride in the quality of domestic politics and democracy actually declined. These findings together provide some evidence that the increase in national pride could be attributed to COVID-19 rather than other confounding factors. Our finding also suggests that the increase in pride reflects citizens' nuanced assessment of the COVID-19 response rather than a sweeping rally around the flag.

Is the increase in national pride a 'good thing'? After all, populists across the world are harping on national pride.

Would COVID-19 then provide additional fodder to the populists? Scholars consider nationalism and patriotism to be two distinct sources of national pride (Blank & Schmidt, 2003; de Figueiredo & Elkins, 2003; Skitka, 2006) .

Nationalism-driven pride is based on the sense of national superiority and, by extension, exclusionary and dominating attitudes towards 'others'. Indeed, in recent years, countries across the globe have witnessed the rise of nationalist ideology and nationalist political parties. These parties deploy nativist identity to create an 'us' versus 'them' narrative; they emphasise the nation's glory while blaming its problems on 'others'. Former US President Trump has employed the 'Latino threat narrative' (Chavez, 2013) and Islamophobia (Tremblay-Boire & Prakash, 2019) in the garb of 'make America great again'. Populists in Europe have blamed migrants for infectious disease although scholarly research finds no such link (Eiset & Wejse, 2017) . Thus, it is plausible that mask wearing, social distancing, and quarantine measures that have disrupted the normal lives of many during the pandemic could reinforce such inward-looking nationalist sentiment and the scapegoating of other countries.

Patriotism-driven pride, on the other hand, does not rely on such exclusionary attitudes. Rather, it centres on the admiration of internal values, norms, and achievements and the tendency to maintain them (McDaniel et al., 2016) . In turn, such constructive patriotic commitments are suggested to have the potential to motivate citizens to perform civic duties (Richey, 2011) and provide support for more inclusive public policies (Brubaker, 2004; Gangl et al., 2016; Konrad & Qari, 2012; Laborde, 2002) . The pandemic, as a common threat, can renew a sense of community and provide an opportunity for governments and citizens alike to demonstrate their ability to act collectively, overcoming class, religious, ethnic and linguistic divides. These actions could range from new social norms on masks wearing to providing meals to vulnerable sections of society who have lost jobs.

Did the Korean COVID-19 response enhance patriotic pride as opposed to nationalist pride? We find that COVID-19 enhanced Korean's pride in their civic awareness; after all, citizens voluntarily followed government guidelines of social distancing and mask wearing. Such civic engagement reinforced in the time of a national crisis could enhance the norms of reciprocity and mutual trust and thus could increase social capital and foster patriotism (Galston, 2007) . One might also argue that Korean pride is inclusive patriotic pride because respondents are proud of their country's role in international cooperation to manage COVID-19. It might reflect a nascent surge in 'globally sensitive patriotism' that can drive public support for policies serving global justice such as foreign aid projects (Nussbaum, 2008) .

Of course, social capital could also have a darker side. Berman's (1997) classic work showed how a robust German civil society in the 1920s facilitated the rise of the Nazi party and led to the demise of Weimar Germany.

Similarly, Chambers and Kopstein (2001) note the resurgence of 'dark' civil society. One could argue that the xenophobic reaction in Korea to immigrant workers and refugees suggests that social cohesiveness could play out in an inclusive as well as exclusive manner. Thus, it is critical to recognise that in Korea, social cohesiveness could be associated with nationalist as well as patriotic pride. Unfortunately, our survey data do not contain a measure or proxy that allows us to separate nationalistic and patriotic attitudes. Future research can empirically explore this by employing distinct measures for nationalism and patriotism.

Another related area for future research is to explore how political ideology-based differences in national identity play out in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study finds that an increase in national pride was more pronounced among progressives rather than conservatives. Does a surge in national pride driven by progressive

Koreans represent the rise in patriotism or nationalism? The existing literature, mainly in the American context, suggests that progressives tend to hold more 'constructive patriotism' committed to liberal principles, whereas conservatives tend to exhibit more 'unconditional support for the nation, its institutions, and its chauvinistic policy preferences' (Parker, 2010) . The conservatives were also more likely to be 'ardent nationalists' who support protectionist and isolationist views (Bonikowski & DiMaggio, 2016) . A future empirical study can investigate if similar ideology-based differences in national identity are observed in Korea and, if so, whether the differences also hold in times of crisis.

Yet another fruitful area for research is to bridge the findings from this study with those focusing on the determinants of a successful response. For instance, civic awareness that geared Korea's successful response to COVID 19 might reflect its collectivistic culture (Cho & Yoon, 2001) , which gives the country an advantage in implementing individual-liberty restricting COVID 19 protection measures (Biddlestone et al., 2020) . If so, the linkage between the successful handling of the crisis and the heightened citizen pride in their civic awareness might also be unique to collectivist societies. Exploring the COVID-19 and national pride nexus across varying cultural contexts (for instance, in other successful countries such as New Zealand, Norway or Israel as well as in less successful countries such as the United States) can be an agenda for future research. 

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Note: Cutpoint estimates for ordered models (Models 3-7) not reported to save space

Note: Cutpoint estimates for ordered models (Models 3-7) not reported to save space

The authors thank Brent J Steele for his valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4792-2216