Values and Cleavages in European Political Cultures in the past Decade: Cleavages within Countries

Abstract

Speaker: Klaus G. Troitzsch, Universität Koblenz (retired) This presentation is a follow-up of my April presentation where some participants asked whether there are interesting and significant cleavages within countries. The new presentation will shed some light on a possible influence of urbanisation, purchasing power and population density on attitudes such as trust in institutions and sympathy for immigrants. The presentation uses the European Social Survey which delivers information of interesting attitude and value distributions such as — among others — trust in political and other institutions and attitudes towards immigrants. The distributions are analysed for several countries, separately for respondents in three different parts of the respective countries according to urbanisation, purchasing power and population density. The intra-country comparison shows extremely significant differences in the attitude distributions between urbanised and rural, rich and poor, densely and sparsely populated parts of most countries. For a recent election in Austria, the analytic method of electoral geography is applied to show a very similar “ecological correlation”. 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.