DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2015.v03i09.020

Pages: 1503-1514

Starting from the notion that nationalism can be presented and interpreted as an attitude syndrome composed of various components or dimensions of ethnic views and sentiments the aim of this paper is to research whether national emotional attachment, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, perception of threat posed by some ethnic minority groups, and national siege mentality are correlated to such a degree that they on latent level form a homogeneous and internally coherent construct of nationalistic syndrome. In this research, the nationalistic syndrome is defined as a system of relatively linked ethnic orientations and sentiments constructed of the threat perception (cognitive component), ethnic exclusionism (potentially behavioural component) and strong national affection (affective component). The study was carried out on a random sample of students at the University of Zagreb (N=368). In order to establish the factor and construct validity of the created Nationalistic syndrome scale (NSS-1)consisting of 15 items, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed. The first order CFA yielded a three-factor model (‘xenophobia and anti-Semitism’, ‘perception of threat to national security’, and ‘national emotional attachment’) which on the level of second-order CFA resulted in plausible model of nationalistic syndrome with acceptable goodness-of-fit measures (SRMR=0.06; RMSEA=0.09; CFI=0.95; NFI=0.95). The results imply that the theoretical model of nationalistic syndrome is confirmed, and high reliability of the NSS-1 (alpha=0.89) proves it is a parsimonious, useful and efficient tool for assessing nationalistic syndrome, and thus one aspect of nationalism in sociological and political sciences.