School of Social and Political Science

Join the Citizenship and Migration Research Network (CMRN) and the Centre for Constitutional Change (CCC) for a lunchtime talk with Professor Antoine Bilodeau.

The talk will take place on Thursday, 24 April 2025, 12:00-13:00, in Room G.02, 19 George Square. 

The Terms of Belonging in Minority Nations: Markers of National Identity in Quebec and Scotland and Attitudes toward Minority Groups

Antoine Bilodeau and Ailsa Henderson

The production and reproduction of community boundaries occupies an important place in minority nations’ politics. If a certain number of studies have examined the ways in which citizens of minority nations define the terms of belonging (McCrone and Bechhofer 2008, 2015; Rosie 2014; Bilodeau and Turgeon 2021), most are limited to case studies. This paper builds on this gap and offers a comparison of the terms of belonging as defined by majority group members in two minority nations, namely Quebec and Scotland. 

Two objectives are pursued. First, we compare the terms of belonging in Quebec and Scotland, more specifically, comparing the markers of national identity that are most salient in the two minority national contexts. Second, we explore the connection between the predominant markers of national identity in Quebec and Scotland and how they shape views toward minority groups. 

More specifically, we examine how the terms of belonging shape views in relation to whether immigration intakes should be increased or decreased, and following Berry’s work (1997) we examine to what extent majority group members expect immigrants to learn the host culture and to shed the culture of their country of origin. Moreover, we examine views toward other national minorities residing in Quebec and Scotland, respectively anglophones and English people.

The paper relies on two online surveys conducted in Quebec in 2022 (n=2400) and in Scotland in 2023 (n=1200) among majority group members using similar question wordings. 

Antoine Bilodeau is a full professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University. His research interests focus on the political integration of immigrants and the dynamics of openness to immigration and ethnocultural diversity in Quebec and elsewhere in the world. In recent years, A. Bilodeau has been awarded a Concordia University Research Award (2016/2017) as well as the John McMenemy Prize twice (in 2020 and also 2011) for the best article published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science. A. Bilodeau is director of the Immigration Research Initiative.