1 Who Supports The Sunflower Movement? An Examination of Nationalist Sentiments 1 Fang-Yu Chen PhD candidate Dept. of Political Science, Michigan State University chenfan6@msu.edu Wei-Ting Yen PhD candidate Dept. of Political Science, Ohio State University yen.76@osu.edu Paper submitted to the Journal of Asian and African Studies, December 2015 Abstract The Sunflower Movement – an occupation of the Legislative Yuan (the Congress) for twenty-four days− was an unprecedented movement in the history of Taiwan. We examine the social foundation of the Movement and explore an important factor that has long been missing in the literature of Taiwanese politics: nationalism. We divide nationalism into three dimensions: national attachment, national chauvinism, and feelings toward other countries. Using original survey data collected six months after the Movement, we find that national attachment (being proud of Taiwan) and anti-China feelings are unique dimensions and both lead to higher supports for the Sunflower Movement. National chauvinism, on the other hand, is not associated with supports for the Movement. Furthermore, the impact of nationalism is contingent on sociotropic views. People who express higher levels of nationalism are more responsive to the issue of rising income inequality when evaluating the Movement. The underlying logic is when people are more nationalistic they care more about the potential social impact of expanding socio-economic exchanges with another country. These results point to the direction that it is necessary to disentangle various components of nationalism and further investigates their effects on individuals’ political behaviors. 1 We are grateful to the comments from the anonymous referees and the editor. We also appreciate the financial support from the Behavior Decision Making Student Grant at The Ohio State University, and the survey execution by the Pollcracy Lab of the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University. Last, we are thankful for the 2016 S.C. Lee Paper Competition Award at the Michigan State University. All errors are ours. For replication data, please visit the online appendix at http://weitingyen.com/papers/.