Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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The Impact of Culture and Economy on Values and Attitudes 1 |
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| Convenor | Dr Hermann Duelmer (University of Cologne) |
| Coordinator 1 | Dr Malina Voicu (GESIS) |
Classical works in social sciences point out the impact of economic development and cultural heritage or cultural settings on value change. Although most of the authors agree on an interconnection, there is no consent regarding the direction of causality. Weber emphasizes the impact of culture, which can shape economic behavior. This perspective states that values influence economic and political changes and it is in turn influenced by them. Therefore, the Protestant Ethic helped the development of capitalism, which made possible industrial revolution and the growth of democracy. In the same line, Huntington relates religious culture with development of democracy. Marxist perspective gives priority to economy, pointing out that technological development conduces to transformation in the economic system, which shape cultural and politics and produced a change in individual values and attitudes. According to the Marxist perspective, the 'ideological suprastructure', composed by values and moral standards, mirrors the socio-economic foundation of society and changes when the economic context is changing.
This session welcome contributions which try to disentangle the effect of culture and economy on values and attitudes, employing survey data. We particularly encourage submissions based on broad international comparisons, using cross-sectional comparative survey data such as European Values Study, World Values Survey, European Social Survey, or International Social Survey Program. Substantive contributions, approaching the impact of economic development versus culture on various types of values, as well as innovative methodological approaches, which help disentangling the effect of culture and economy on social values and attitudes, are equality welcome.
The global financial meltdown of September 2008 has plunged Europe into its most severe economic crisis since the 1930s. During this crisis, European welfare states have proven to be useful buffers that protect citizens from external economic shocks. At the same time, deficits in the national budgets have raised questions about the financial sustainability of current welfare regulations, and have consequently revived the call for welfare reform.
These developments bring the question of welfare state legitimacy and social solidarity to the fore. This paper aims at enhancing scientific understanding of how egalitarian attitudes (i.e. one of the crucial dimensions of welfare legitimacy - van Oorschot & Meuleman 2012) change in times of economic downturn. For this purpose, we analyze over twenty waves from the Dutch repeated cross-sectional survey 'Cultural changes in the Netherlands' (1975-2010). Egalitarian attitudes are measured by means of three items gauging the preferred degree of equality of income and possessions. A crucial advantage of this data source is the wide time range, which makes it possible to distinguish between severe economic crisis and normal business cycles. In order to disentangle various drivers of attitude change -i.e. age, cohort and period effects- we employ the mixed models approach to age-period-cohort analysis proposed by Yang & Land (2006).
The results are indicative of both age and period effects, while cohort differences seem to be virtually absent. Individual-level as well as contextual variables are used to explain (trends in) egalitarian attitudes.
Existing literature (Delhey & Newton, 2003; Hardin 1996) discusses the impact of negative life events, particularly divorce, on social trust. It is argued that, for instance, experiencing divorce, leads to a more negative view of society, which turns in lower levels of trusting others (Alessina & La Ferrara, 2002; Paxton, 2007; Rahn, Yoon and Loflin, 2003; Voicu, 2012). Divorce disrupts social networks and decreases bridging social capital (Donatti & Prandini, 2007) and, implicitly, social trust. This paper goes further and asks if the relation is not shaped by the social context. Does the societal culture embed mechanisms that may alleviate the negative impact of specific life events? Are the experiences of the people with the same education, gender or age a more appropriate framework of reference to prevent divorce to have disrupting effects? Would divorce be less harming in an environment where the divorcement rate is high or which is richer in social permissiveness towards marital separation? How long the effect of experiencing a negative life event lasts? The most recent wave of the European Values Survey allows asking such questions for the case of experiencing own divorce, the divorce of a child, the divorce of the parents, and the divorce of other relatives. I employ multilevel analysis, controlling on the higher levels for aggregate-level divorcement rate and tolerance towards divorce, both at societal level, but also group-wise, considering age, gender and education as defining for the narrower framework of reference that one may use.
Across democratic Europe, one can identify different cultures of trust, ranging from the high-trust cultures in the North to the low-trust or even distrust cultures in Southern and Eastern Europe. In order to identify different types of trust cultures, I use three different components: (1) interpersonal trust, (2) trust in the central institutions of the political system (government, Parliament, political parties), and (3) functional substitutes of trust (via Sztompka): providentialism (measured as religiosity), corruption (measured as perceived level of corruption), paternalism (measured as preference for a strong leader), and externalization of trust (measured as trust in international organizations).
The main argument of this paper is that the type of trust culture one lives in determines one's attachment to democratic values. Using the latest waves of WVS/EVS and measuring trust culture based on the three dimensions identified above, I test for the effect of the functional substitutes of trust: do they manage to completely replace trust, helping to build diffuse support for democracy or do they only manage to assure the short-term functioning of the society, whitout actually having an effect (or even having a negative one) on diffuse support for democracy?
The models I estimate are hierarchical models, accounting for respondents' grouping within different cultural contexts. Individual level data for the three components of trust cultures are both aggregated at country level and used in the models as contextual variables, and used as individual level variables, allowing thus for testing for several interaction effects.
Our paper addresses the issue of how the political culture influences the relationship between human values and political attitudes across national contexts. Political attitudes can be defined as evaluations and preferences regarding social, economic and cultural issues that either are, or are subject to debate as to whether they should be, regulated by politics. Based on the literature, two attitude dimensions can be identified. First, the socio-economic dimension encompasses the tension between economic equality and equity (rewarding achievements and effort). Second, the socio-cultural dimension focuses on the tension between individual and civil liberties vs. following traditions and conservative norms. Very few comparative studies systematically investigate the influence of a coherent structure of more basic and abstract motivations on attitudes. We aim to fill this gap by studying the influence of basic human values on the socio-economic and socio-cultural attitude dimensions across national contexts. Moreover, the study also explores the political culture as a key contextual factor (at the country-level) modifying the individual-level relationships between values and attitudes. More specifically, we investigate the moderating influence of political articulation, i.e., the articulation of socio-economic and socio-cultural issues in the political debate. The study utilizes data from the European Social Survey (ESS) from the year 2008, and employ multi-group structural equation modeling (MGSEM) in order to investigate the impact of human values and political attitudes across European countries, and Manifesto data to study how the political culture moderates this relationship across national contexts.