Group-based nostalgia has been examined by studying nostalgia within different types of social groups, including racial (Reyna et al., 2022), cultural and religious (Wohl et al., 2020b), ethnic (Martinovic et al., 2018), generational (Hibbing et al., 2017), class (Smith & Campbell, 2017) and national groups (Smeekes, 2015). Studies on national nostalgia predominantly operationalize the concept by asking participants directly how nostalgic they feel when they think about their country’s past (i.e., van Prooijen et al., 2022), whether they think their country was a better place to live 50 years ago (i.e., Richards et al., 2020) or whether they feel nostalgic for different aspects of their groups’ past (Baldwin et al., 2018; Smeekes, 2015; Smeekes et al., 2015). In the case of the latter examples, statements include asking how nostalgic participants feel for ‘the way people were in the past’, ‘the way society was’, ‘the values people had in the past’ or the ‘sort of place the country was before’ (i.e., Loughnane et al., 2024). As such, existing research on national nostalgia has come a long way in evidencing the presence of national nostalgia among the public, illustrating how heightened levels of national nostalgia become associated with increased ingroup identification (Smeekes, 2015; Wildschut et al., 2014), outgroup prejudice (Behler et al., 2021), ingroup bias (Dimitriadou et al., 2019) and populist attitudes and support (Smeekes et al., 2021; van Prooijen et al., 2022). But what do people mean when they express nostalgia for the way ‘people were’ or ‘society was’? What parts of history come to mind when people say that they feel nostalgic for the past?

Oftentimes, nostalgic sentiments are triggered in times of social transition and change (Boym, 2001; Davis, 1979; Wilson, 2005), playing a regulatory function (Wildschut & Sedikides, 2023) to counteract anxieties, losses, or perceived threats to the group (Ionescu et al., 2025; Smeekes et al., 2018). As such, understanding what people are nostalgic for can give us an insight into what kind of loss, threat or worries they perceived to be experiencing in the present.

It has been argued that nostalgia is more prominent on the right of the political spectrum, with increasing research showing a strong relationship between nostalgia and right-wing political attitudes (i.e., Elçi, 2022; Versteegen, 2024), as well as a prevalence of nostalgia appeals in right-wing rhetoric (Kenny, 2017; Kešić et al., 2022; Mols & Jetten, 2014). Despite this evidence, national nostalgia is not limited to the ideological right (Lammers, 2023), but has also been found within the political left, in response to negative political changes in the present (Fetterman et al., 2021). For example, Hibbing et al. (2017) show that how people perceive the political past (and how nostalgic they are for it) shapes their evaluations of the political present, a trend identified across the ideological spectrum. Thus, while being nostalgic might cut across political divides, the mobilization of it seems more prevalent in the context of right-wing rhetoric, perhaps underpinning the disproportional research on nostalgia within the context of right-wing ideologies. Key to the bottom-up aims of the current paper is, therefore, to both uncover what people across the ideological spectrum are nostalgic for and to then assess whether these nostalgic contents are differentially related to political preferences, evidencing how certain ways of representing the past might serve more potent ‘symbolic reserves’ for political mobilization.

While previous research has examined what nostalgia, as a concept, means to people (i.e., Hepper et al., 2012), evidencing its inherently social nature (Juhl & Biskas, 2023), less research exists examining the links between nostalgia content and key socio-political attitudes. In other words, how different types of nostalgia for different types of pasts, might shape sociopolitical attitudes in different ways. To address this gap, research has begun examining what happens to contemporary socio-political attitudes when we manipulate how the past is remembered, finding that it can lead to more, or less, inclusive political attitudes (i.e., Lammers & Baldwin, 2020; Wohl et al., 2020b). These studies have developed typologies of nostalgia by contrasting nostalgia for an open v. homogenous society (Stefaniak et al., 2021; Wohl et al., 2020b) and egalitarian v. traditional forms of nostalgia (Richards et al., 2020). This shift in focus is important as it acknowledges, and illustrates, how the relationship between nostalgic sentiments and sociopolitical attitudes is mediated by meaning. As Wohl and colleagues (2020a, p. 3) argue “it is important to know what group members are nostalgizing about”, where “differing aspects of the past may be selectively brought to light or forgotten” depending on the perceived needs and goals of the present.

This requires us to understand better how the meaning given to the past translates into different forms of nostalgia, and whether all salient memories of the past have a potential to become mobilized through the politicization of nostalgia. While the abovementioned research has moved us some way in addressing the relationship between the content of nostalgia and contemporary socio-political attitudes, this has been done by pre-defining the ‘content’ that participants engage with, i.e., that they can express nostalgia for. A gap remains in considering how the ‘past’ is given meaning by individuals, and how this informs what they are nostalgic for. Research on social representations of history and collective memories (Liu & Hilton, 2005; Wagoner, 2015) goes some way in addressing this gap by theoretically and empirically evidencing the socially constructed nature of historical remembering, and how what we remember tends to align with social identity needs and projected socio-political futures (Liu & Hilton, 2005; Mols & Jetten, 2014; Obradović, 2016). Previous research finds that, across the world, history is predominantly remembered in terms of politics and war, both when reflecting on national, and world, history (Liu et al., 2005).

While this line of research gives us a good idea as to which historical events might be salient in collective memory, it says less about how potent these events might be for nostalgic ‘picking’, namely how certain collective memories can be mobilized to legitimize political agendas in the present and future (Liu & Hilton, 2005). What is needed is to marry these two lines of work to better understand when, how and why the politicization of nostalgia is effective in shaping contemporary sociopolitical attitudes of citizens. This is what we aimed to achieve through our two studies.

Study 1 identified three dominant ways of positively representing the past: through achievements, power and status, and communality. We also uncovered an additional theme directly rejecting the romanticization of history. Two themes highlighted positively valued, yet lost, aspects of the past (power/status and communality), one highlighted positively valued and present-informing elements of the past (achievements), while the fourth rejected the notion of a ‘greatest era in history’ altogether (national nostalgia rejection). By allowing the respondent to define their own understanding of the nation’s “greatest era”, we have captured particularly ecologically valid themes of representing the past. These themes echo findings from recent research on historical narratives in the US, which identified three categories of narratives: progress, glorification, or criticality (Choi & Liu, 2024).

Next, we assessed whether the predictors theorized in the existing literature were indeed associated with a respondent’s spontaneous expression of the four themes. Notably, we found that not all ways of representing a nation’s history are similarly associated with a longing for the past or a connection to the national identity. Those who emphasised an era of power and status were more likely to strongly value their British identity, while those who represented history in terms of communality did not consistently vary in terms of their British identity. Both groups of people also felt that the country’s past was better (generalized national nostalgia) and different from the present (collective discontinuity), echoing previous research (i.e., Wohl et al., 2020b). Those who emphasise power/status as well as communality seem to have a discontinuous nature in the open-ended responses, making them potentially more susceptible aspects of the past that can be mobilized rhetorically and psychologically.

In contrast, those who positively mentioned the nation’s achievements did not feel a distinct disconnection with the past – in fact, the opposite. Similarly, those who rejected nostalgia represented the past as problematic, multifaceted and complex, or as a negative part of history that continues to inform the present. In this case too, the negative correlation with collective discontinuity makes sense. Those who reject nostalgia outright do not see the past and the present as disconnected, but instead the problems of yesterday find expression in contemporary society. The negative relationship found between national nostalgia rejection and British identity centrality further speaks to existing literature on the relationship between intra-group criticism and belonging (i.e., Penic et al., 2016; Obradović, 2016). While the correlations were low, they still evidence a differential relationship between the expression of nostalgia content and group identification, continuity, and political ideology.

Despite these important findings, a key concern with existing research on nostalgia is whether the prompting of nostalgic or positive expressions of history creates an artificial response to the past that is not reflective of how we think about history when unprompted to ‘glorify’ it. In other words, do the themes identified in Study 1 reflect collective memory more generally? If that is the case, it illustrates how certain ways of remembering the past, or reflecting on a nation's history, become ‘riper’ for nostalgic picking by political elites. To explore this, we used a more neutral phrasing of our open-ended questions in Study 2, asking about ‘important’ rather than ‘great’ parts of national history. Using a neutral phrasing we hoped to establish the robustness of the themes identified in Study 1, which in turn we used to develop a scale to capture the multiple dimensions of national nostalgia.

Drawing on a neutral phrasing of what individuals perceive as salient about a nation’s past, our findings captured not only positive representations of history, but also the critical aspects and complex meanings group members give to the past. These findings provide additional support for our nostalgic content categories, as even when a positive historical outlook was not being explicitly primed our themes were meaningfully in organizing how participants viewed their nation’s past.

The quantitative analysis contributed further evidence on the need to differentiate between different types of nostalgic content. The MDNN sub-dimensions were similarly associated with generalized national nostalgia and collective discontinuity, supporting the argument that there are varied ways of ‘nostalgizing’ the past (Wohl et al., 2020a). However, beyond this, the relevance of different nostalgia content for national identity centrality, political ideology, and political party preferences tells an interesting story. Namely, nostalgia for power/status stands out as a key dimension of nostalgia that has both a potent identity appeal and political appeal across the three different countries. The other forms of nostalgia (achievements and communality) have different political links in the three countries, suggesting that the extent to which different forms of national nostalgia have been mobilized politically depends on the national context and is not uniform across cultures.

The nature of our design comes with some limitations. Primarily, in enabling people to define the meaning they give to the past, we took a more indirect approach towards examining expressions of national nostalgia. Doing so, we captured a variety of responses, which included both rejections of nostalgia and arguments that positively linked the past with the present through a sense of continuity. The benefits of this are that we were able to illustrate how different meanings given to the past link differentially to group identification, nostalgia, and political preferences. However, future research could more directly tap into different meanings by making explicit a sense of sentimental longing for the past.

Second, the findings from our studies are based on a correlational design, meaning causation cannot be established or argued. More research is needed to confirm the causal relationships between different nostalgia content and socio-political attitudes. Such future research will benefit from embracing the complexity of national nostalgia and the varied content that can be employed to connect with our national identities, our perceptions of change, and our political preferences for the future.

Lastly, the WEIRD sample of the paper comes with its own limitations. The selection of countries with colonial and imperial histories limits the generalizability of the findings to non-WEIRD and non-colonial contexts and requires further research to examine its usefulness in other countries. However, the presence of difference even across the three countries is encouraging as it signals to us the potential to examine divergences in which dimensions of the scale might be prevalent across cultural contexts, and what might be context specific. The MDNN scale (see Supplementary Materials, S18 for final scale) is not exhaustive in its ability to capture all types of nostalgia, but we see it as a starting point for further research on the politicization of nostalgia more specifically, and how different ways of remembering the past can mobilize citizens to take political action in the present.

Across two studies with data from three countries, we identify different nostalgia content and illustrate how these relate differentially with sense of belonging, continuity, and political preferences. Our results indicate that there are different ways to engage with history more broadly; identifying positive aspects that have shaped the present, identifying positive aspects that have been lost and identifying negative and critical aspects of the past that need addressing. These differences in how meaning informs social psychological processes is in turn linked with our political preferences, where certain ways of conceptualizing the past (as a time of power and status), and reminiscing about it, are more strongly associated with right-wing ideology and identity centrality than others. Together, these findings illustrate the link between longing and belonging, and how certain parts of the past become more strongly associated with political preferences in the present.