Citizenship Tests and the State Narration of National Identity in Western Democracies

Citizenship tests are often treated as administrative tools for assessing whether prospective citizens possess sufficient knowledge of their new country. This paper argues that they should also be read as state-authored narratives of national identity. By deciding what newcomers must learn and internalise, states define the moral, historical and institutional terms of national belonging. The paper asks how contemporary Western democracies use citizenship tests to draw the boundaries of national membership, and what these tests reveal about official conceptions of national identity. It draws on an original dataset of 1,832 questions from official citizenship test materials in twelve Western democracies: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Using manual content analysis, the study codes test questions across five dimensions of national identity: national pride, history and culture, state institutions, values and norms, and multiculturalism. The findings show that citizenship tests operate both as administrative instruments and as symbolic tools of nation-building. Across the twelve cases, belonging is rarely defined through ancestry or descent. Instead, states mostly construct membership through political institutions, historical knowledge, civic norms and behavioural expectations. However, these broadly civic narratives differ substantially in content. More inclusive integration regimes do not necessarily produce more inclusive test content. Authoritarian legacies only partly shape the emphasis on democratic values and civic responsibility. The clearest contrast appears between Anglo-Saxon and non–Anglo-Saxon cases: the former tend to prioritise institutional knowledge, individual rights and civic behaviour, while the latter give greater weight to welfare-related values, legal frameworks and broader state knowledge. The paper therefore challenges simple civic–ethnic distinctions in the study of national identity. It proposes a more differentiated typology of citizenship-test narratives, including political-cultural, normative-political, multicultural-political and composite models. By shifting attention from abstract models of nationhood to the concrete content states require newcomers to learn, the paper shows that citizenship tests are underexplored sites where states project who they are and who they expect future citizens to become.