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People who live closer to long-run earthquake risk report stronger national in-group feelings: more pride in their country, more willingness to fight for it, and more support for giving nationals priority when jobs are scarce. The author measures this with a “national‑core” index made from three survey items (pride, willingness to fight, and job priority). Using data from the World Values Survey (1981–2022) across 63 countries and 494 subnational regions, the study finds that proximity to high‑risk seismic zones is associated with a meaningful increase on this index and on each of its three parts.
To reach this result the researcher matched individual survey responses to maps of long‑run seismic risk and compared people living in different regions of the same country and year. The main outcomes are the national‑core index and its components. The statistical estimates are reported in standardized form: closer distance to high‑risk zones predicts stronger national attachment overall, and the component effects are similarly-sized for pride, willingness to fight, and jobs priority.
The paper separates two ways earthquake risk could affect national feeling. One is a distributive channel: when a disaster hits many neighbors at once — a so‑called covariate risk — local and family insurance are less reliable, so people may turn to the state and treat national membership as a rule for sharing scarce public resources. The other is an expressive channel: people may interpret disaster as a shared national ordeal that generates pride and readiness to sacrifice. The expressive response is not automatic. It is strongest where religion and the state are institutionally aligned and where the religious field is cohesive, because religious institutions supply symbolic ways to narrate hardship as collective duty. The study also finds that religiosity rises near seismic risk, while family attachment and hostility toward outsiders do not.
A complementary test looks at whether actual earthquakes between survey waves change attitudes. On average, the paper finds no robust short‑run jump in the national‑core index after an earthquake. But when there is a detectable short‑run effect it appears mainly among older, place‑attached residents who cannot easily move away. That pattern supports the idea that chronic, inescapable risk shapes long‑run attitudes more than single events do.
The author reports a range of robustness checks. Proximity to high‑risk seismic zones predicts realized earthquake exposure and the pattern is not reproduced by proximity to tsunamis, storms, or volcano hazards. The results hold after controlling for geographic and demographic factors. Still, the paper notes limits: the short‑run and long‑run designs estimate different objects, so their results need not match exactly, and formal comparisons across the two identity margins remain imprecise. These caveats temper how strongly we can generalize.
Taken together, the study offers a demand‑side explanation for national attachment. Where environmental shocks are likely to overwhelm local coping, people appear to turn toward larger communities of protection and meaning — the nation and, when institutions support it, religion. The findings highlight how a chronic environmental threat can reshape social preferences, while also showing that the expressive public language to make disasters into national stories depends on local institutions and religious structures.