The Structure of Political Attitudes and Values

Abstract

This panel deals with the issues of the consistency and level of constraint among attitudes and values, i.e. we want to know to what extent are attitudes and values structured together in a coherent fashion and stable over time. Please recall from the section abstract that first and foremost «political values and political attitudes include ‘Old Politics’ orientations such as economic left-right and religious/secular values, and ‘New Politics’ orientations such as materialist/post-materialist values, libertarian/authoritarian values, ecology versus economic growth, and immigration orientations.» However, at least for the European polities, some people have been arguing that new dimensions of political competition (like European issues or globalization) have come to the front in recent decades. Moreover, at least in some countries the 2008 international financial crises and its aftermath in Europe (the sovereign debt crisis and the austerity policies that followed and seem to be here to stay) seem to be behind the creation new parties, or at the least the surge of old parties that were weak before the crisis and are now becoming much stronger, and perhaps new issue or ideological divides structured around the pro vs anti austerity camps. Finally, especially in new democracies across the world sometimes other issues (more or less in favor of democratization, for example) come also to the front in political competition. Thus, another set of questions that might be answered in this panel are to what extent some of this new divides (Europe, Globalization, Pro vs Anti Austerity, Democratization) are, at least in some countries, more or less coherently associated with the ‘old politics’ and ‘new politics’ value dimensions. Papers using comparative and/or longitudinal approaches are most welcomed.

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