National Political Cultures and the European Union. A Quasi-Experimental Antecedent of the Financial Crisis

This paper is part of my PhD monograph, whose complete focus is on the possible influence national political cultures had during the Transnational Deliberative Poll Europolis, held in Bruxelles a week before the European Parliament Elections in 2009. Most previous studies have defined political culture as a set of shared values, assuming the existence of a single, national culture within each country they analyzed (e.g., Almond and Verba, 1965; Inglehart, 1997; Schwartz, 1999). Pye (1991) calls political culture one of the few mega-concepts in the social sciences, being culture “a complex multi-level construct shared among individuals belonging to a group or society” (Taras and Half, 2009). In order to succeed in operationalizing the conceptual complexity of “political culture”, the working definition adopted will be focused on aggregation of values, extracted from the 4th wave of the European Values Study, as it was the most comprehensive survey with all of the 27 EU countries before the financial crisis reached Europe. With the purpose of representing the most suitable image of these national political cultures, it has been decided to focus on four indicators: tolerance, human values, political participation and civism. Since Europolis dealt with immigration and climate change, the research question of this paper is: how did EU countries position themselves towards these issues? Predictions are made depending on their EU membership (before/after 2004) and the adoption of the Euro as their currency, to verify the following hypotheses: H1 – EU15 countries have different positions on immigration than those entered after 2004; H2 – EU27 countries have mixed position on climate change; H3 – EU countries adopting the Euro as their currency have different positions on immigration than those who did not adopt it.