Typology of civic identity

Curr Issues Personal Psychol. 2022 Nov 9;11(2):150-161. doi: 10.5114/cipp.2022.116324. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Background: Civic identity is considered a kind of organizational identity, which is a value-semantic experience of the individual's identity with themself as a citizen of the state. It is manifested in the institutional, community, and individual dimensions. Each of the mentioned dimensions of civic identity can be differently developed (actualized) in a particular individual, which suggests the existence of certain types of civic identity. The article aims to empirically verify the typology of the civic identity of an individual and identify both the most common and least common types among Ukrainian citizens.

Participants and procedure: The study involved 965 citizens of Ukraine aged 16-60, of whom 377 were men (39.1%) and 588 women (60.9%). To assess the dimensions of civic identity and establish the development degree of each of them, the author's questionnaire "Diagnosis of maturity and type of civic identity" was used.

Results: The existence of 8 main types of civic identity inherent in Ukrainians has been empirically established, namely Institutional-community (17%), Latent (16%), Game (16%), Community-game (15%), Institutional-game (12%), Community (11%), Versatile (8%), and Institutional (5%).

Conclusions: Most citizens of Ukraine tend to engage in game interaction with the state, which is dominated by subject-object paradigms. The orientation of the game interaction with the state is also societal, which indicates that games and scenarios are borrowed from others and conditioned mainly by conformity rather than conscious choice. The prevalence of the Latent (indeterminate) type of civic identity coincides with the study subjects' relatively low level of civic identity maturity.

Keywords: civic identity; community of citizens; dimensions of identity; game interaction; role of citizen; state.