Contextual effects on subjective national identity JOAN BARCELÓ The Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA ABSTRACT. Does the interaction between context and individual-level features affect political attitudes? By using the case of Catalonia, a receiver region of interna- tional and national immigration since the fifties, this paper intersects a classic accul- turation model and a newly reemerging literature in political science on contextual determinants of political behaviour to analyze how context affects subjective national identity. Results reveal that environment matters. The Percentage of Spain-born population in the municipality is statistically significant to account for variance in the subjective national identity, even after controlling for age, sex, origin, language and left–right orientation and other contextual factors. This conclusion suggests that researchers should not underestimate the direct effect of the environment on feelings of belonging in contexts of rival identities. KEYWORDS: acculturation, assimilation, immigration, integration, multilevel models, neighborhood effects 1. Introduction The analysis of acculturation processes has been one of the topics with more attention in the social sciences. It has been the concern of hundreds of scholars from varying fields such as economists, sociologists, political scientists, psy- chologists, among others, and its salience in the literature has been increasing in the last decades due to the exponential trends of international migration. Furthermore, the accentuated cultural differences between the sending and the receiving societies that characterize the new waves of immigration (e.g. Western individualism vs. Latin-American or African collectivism; Triandis 1995) have required intense efforts for theoretical and empirical studies of what has sometimes been conceptualized as ‘cultural shock’ (Oberg 1960) or ‘acculturative stress’ (Berry 1970). Acculturation is defined as comprehending ‘those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups’ (Redfield et al. 1936: 149). However, the impact tends to be more prominent for one of the two groups (Berry 1990). At the same time, there exists a distinction between collective and psychological acculturation. EN AS JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM NATIONS AND NATIONALISM Nations and Nationalism 20 (4), 2014, 701–720. DOI: 10.1111/nana.12080 © The author(s) 2014. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2014