European Sociopolitical Mentalities: Identifying Pro- and Antidemocratic Tendencies

ABSTRACT

A sequel to an analysis of citizens' predispositions for democracy (Part I), this study focuses on larger units, shared ideologies. European ideologies were explored by secondary data analysis of European Values Study (EVS) wave 4, years 2008–2010, 44 countries, 73 questionnaire items, N = 63,281 respondents. The nature of the ideologies is inviting to cluster analysis approach as they tend to be described in terms of ‘patterned clusters’ and likened to an urban cacophony. We applied cluster analysis to reveal prevalent ideological patterns (pro- and antidemocratic tendencies) within the noise of attitudes, values, and behavioral tendencies of European voters and nonvoters. This time our unit was not an individual citizen but a more general unit, ‘an averaged electoral case’. Each major party and also ‘no party’, ‘other party’, and ‘DK/NA’ categories for each country were represented by an abstracted (non)voter with average opinions (using all 73 variables), producing N = 302 averaged electoral tendencies. These were subjected to hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis. Resulting clusters partitioned Europe into three political regions: active democracy (the north-west; 41% of Europeans, 64.5% democratic), moderate democracy (southern and postcommunist Europe; 48% of Europeans, 21.7% democratic), passive democracy (south-east: Turkey, Romania, Albania, Northern Cyprus; 11% of Europeans, 9.6% democratic). This study thus provided a complementary perspective to the study from Part I (which manifested trans-nationally shared political mentalities of European citizens): European public ideologies manifested regional divides and confirmed the lack of internationally shared public sphere.

Key words:

• ideology
• democracy
• political parties
• hierarchical cluster analysis
• EVS

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The closest to our approach in the present study appear works by Makarovič et al. (2007) and Makarovič (2008). Their method, scope, and analytical units were different (focusing exclusively at the EU, they analyzed just 10 variables of socio-political participation from an earlier EVS wave while we included all European countries and almost all EVS variables).

² The rest of observations classified into single outliers or small sub-clusters (Kosovo parties, German PDS, Maltesian extremists, and local nationalist parties such as SDA, the Bosnian party in Serbia).

³ The bivariatwe results presented here were also confirmed by multinomial regression conducted with 309 original units (groupings of political parties adherents and those indifferent/undecided). Significance of both Pearson and deviance goodness of fit test (GOF) is 1.00. Intensity of relationship was found as seemingly very high (Pseudo R² between .732 and .849). Significant predictors (Likelihood ratio tests sig. <.001) included political mentalities identified in Part I, age, HH income, country groups, and several independent attitudinal parceled indices including patriotism, justification of extreme measures, and trespassing. The interactions with the clustered political mentalities are decsribed further. As concerns age, the passive democracies are slightly younger on average. Other predictors will be treated in our next publication, since there is not enough space here.

⁴ In the EU analyses by Makarovič only Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden qualified as active democracies.

Additional information

Funding

This article has been written as part of the research and dissemination activities of EUROSPHERE (http://eurospheres.org), an integrated project that was funded by the European Union's 6th Framework Programme and coordinated by the University of Bergen with the participation of 17 European research institutions; in its final stage, this study was supported also by RVO 68081740.

Notes on contributors

Jaroslav Košťál

Jaroslav Košťál, Sociologist (Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia), Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic with an extensive practice in opinion polling; fields of interest: multivariate statistical methods in social sciences, political culture in Europe; publication outlets include: The Public-Javnost, Ceskoslovenska psychologie, co-author of books Democratic Culture in the Czech Republic: Civic culture, ethos and patriotism in comparative perspective and Political Culture and Democratic Citizenship in Comparative Perspective.

Martina Klicperová-Baker

Martina Klicperová-Baker, Political Psychologist (Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia), Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and San Diego State University; fields of interests: Psychology of Democracy, Psychology of Transition to Democracy; publication outlets include: Sage Handbook of Citizenship and Democracy, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, Behavioral Processes, Time and Society, Global Bioethics.