What is it that makes someone proud of where they live? Our partners at Ipsos reached out to six different countries around the world to understand what attributes their citizens are most proud of, and how their perspective varies from the national level to the local.

During the survey, individuals were asked to select up to three factors that they consider themselves most proud of in regard to their nation and their city: sustainability efforts; sports teams; natural beauty; food and culture; history; exciting events and activities; the people; music, art, and entertainment; contributions to science and technology; and how it’s governed.

What make you most proud of the country where you live?

When looking at a national level, certain characteristics were consistently ranked as areas that citizens take most pride in. ‘Natural beauty’, for example, consistently ranked in the top three criteria for all six surveyed countries. ‘History’ was also ranked as one of the top three factors for all countries except for Germany.

Table 1: The top three factors that citizens are most proud of their country for.

What makes you most proud of the city / town where you live?

When asked about the cities or towns where respondents lived, similar characteristics rose to the top of the pile, with ‘natural beauty’ in the top two for all countries surveyed. And whilst ‘people’ was flagged by several countries as a top criteria at a national level (Germany, Great Britain, and United States), it was far more prominent in responses of what citizens were most proud of their city or town for.

Table 2: The top three factors that citizens are most proud of their city / town for.

Criteria such as sports teams; exciting events and activities; music, art, and entertainment; contributions to science and technology; and how it’s governed, were far less likely to be selected as something citizens were proud of – and this occurred at both the city and the national levels. This is perhaps due to the fact that these areas have much narrower fields of impact, but also due to a lack of combined narrative around these areas. Both ‘history’ and ‘natural beauty’ are visibly, tangibly present in a citizens’ life, whereas it seems more likely that ‘contributions to science and technology’ is an area that fewer residents have a view on what their city or country is achieving.

Would you recommend your country or city?

The final question in the survey aimed to identify whether citizens would recommend their countries or their cities as a place to visit, work, live, or invest/start a business in. On the whole, the research found that people were far more likely to recommend their countries as a place to live in or visit, rather than to work or invest/start a business in.

The outlier to this is Germany, where only 29% would recommend their country as a destination for a leisure trip, although they were over the global average for number of people who would recommend the country as somewhere to live (56.7%, +4.4% on the global average).

Also notably, respondents in China were the most likely of all six countries to recommend their country and their city as a place to work, live, and invest/start a business in. And this was particularly significant in the number of respondents who would recommend China as a country to invest / start a business in: while 42% of Chinese respondents said they would recommend the country for investment, 12% higher than the next country in the category, India (30%).

Table 3: An average of responses across all six surveyed countries for whether they’d recommend their country or city across four areas.

Despite being highly ranked at both the country and the city level, respondents were more likely to recommend someone to live in their city (56%) rather than their country (52%).  It seems likely this is due to closer ties to the local experience over the nation. It is also worth considering that many residents will have far less experience on investing in their communities than living in them -  on the global average, business owners or senior executive/decision makers are more likely to recommend their city as a place to invest than those who aren’t (24 and 24% in comparison to 18% and 16% respectively).

Ipsos’s Jason McGrath will be unpacking this research and what it means for your place strategies at City Nation Place Global, which will take place in London this November 9-10. Book your place to hear more from this exclusive research.