Values and cleavages in European political cultures in the past four decades

Abstract

Speaker: Klaus G. Troitzsch This presentation will show how attitude distributions in different European countries changed during the past four decades and how large differences between European countries are. The presentation uses the European Value Study and the European Social Survey both of which deliver information of interesting attitude and value distributions such as trust in political and other institutions, attitudes towards immigrants and the orientation at traditional, altruistic and hedonistic values. These distributions are analysed on a country level across time and show differences between countries in Western Europe and those in Eastern Europe as well between periods. A returning feature of such distributions is that they are mostly far from Gaussian but very often skewed to one direction: There are many more extreme positions than one would expect if the distributions were Gaussian, and modes, medians and means are often far apart. This can be explained with a simulation model that was first presented sixty years ago and recently replicated to show that the mechanisms simulated in the model generate such skewed or sometimes bimodal distributions.