Social Rootedness: Examining Ethnic and National Attachments in Ghana

The question of national unity has exercised the minds of researchers and politicians since the dawn of independence. But since the wave of democratisation in the late 1980s, ethnicity again has come under the spotlight as electoral competition highlighted the problem of divisive politics across the democratising world. In this study, I pose the question: what is the impact of alternative group loyalties on national attachment? Using a survey of 996 university students, I find evidence supporting recent reports of declining salience of ethnicity in Ghana. However, the effect of ethnicity on national attachment was counterintuitive. Conceptually, individualistic orientations undermined national attachment, while collectivistic orientations boosted it. I argue that rather than being contradictory impulses, ethnicity and national attachment are both underlaid by the same collectivistic orientation, pointing to the importance of social rootedness. I deploy qualitative and historical data to give substance and texture to these findings.