Detecting Political Culture and Behavior Discourses with Multivariate Analysis: An Application in Greece

The proposed paper presents the application of a multivariate methodological approach, following Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and Factorial Correspondence analysis (AFC) in two steps (Benzécri et al, 1973), in an attempt to investigate the inner correlations between political culture and political behavior. The aim of the study is to uncover the political cultural profiles in terms of the construction of the “political self” and the “moral self” (Taylor, 1991) and understand how these cultural discourses interact with other political behavior variables, such as political interest, political mobilization, and political information. To present and develop the method in this, this paper uses as an example the data analysis and results of a survey among the students of Aristotle Thessaloniki in spring 2019. To deal with the creation of cultural discourses we base our analysis on the method of symbolic representation, with the use of pictures which represent various concepts of specific terms such as “democracy” or” moral values” (Maragudakis and Chadjipadelis, 2019). The variables for the symbolic representation of the democratic self and the moral self are analyzed in the first step with HCA, producing clusters of pictures as well as clusters of the respondents. These new cluster membership variables (one for the democratic self and one for the moral self) are identified, so that we understand the profile of each cluster. Then in a second step of analysis these two cluster membership variables ae jointly analyzed with the rest of the political behavioral variables with AFC. Correspondence analysis, at this stage allows the reorganization of all categories upon several dimensions which describe the phenomenon (the overall inertia of the data) (Greenacre, 2007). The coordinates of the categories are clustered together, producing specific sets of categories of the variables of the analysis. These sets of characteristics reflect political culture discourses, followed by the political behavior characteristics that they are linked to. Following this method, the various behavioral and cultural discourses can be visualized further in a two-dimensional system where all categories are positioned on the axes according to their coefficients (Greenacre, 2010). The visualization in this behavioral map, not only makes the discourses distinctly visible and comprehensible, but in addition, we can understand further the inner antagonisms between the discourses by assessing their position on this cartesian field (discourses which are on the edges of on-axis or discourses which are close together on one side of a single axis). References Maragudakis, M., and Chadjipadelis, T. 2019. The Greek Crisis and its Cultural Origins, Marangudakis, M. with Chadjipadelis, Th. (2019). The Greek Crisis and its Cultural Origins. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Jean Paul Benzécri et al. 1973. L’ analyse des données. Tome 1: La taxinomie. Tome 2: Analyse des Correspondances. Paris: Dunod. Greenacre, M. 2007. Correspondence Analysis in Practice. Boca Raton: Chapman and Hall/CRC. Greenacre, M. 2010. Biplots in Practice. Fundación BBVA. Taylor, C. 1991. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.