Beyond the cultural cleavage: Polarisation or differentiation of values?

Studies on the restructuring of political conflicts in Western democracies postulate that Europeanisation and globalization have led to the emergence of a new cultural cleavage. The resulting polarisation around communitarian and cosmopolitan attitudes creates a significant fault line in contemporary societies, exploited by populist political actors. As a result, national identity dynamics have become re-ignited in the European Union (EU). This paper asks how such communitarian/cosmopolitan cleavage relates to the erosion of the post-WWII democratic consensus within European societies. In particular, we explore how the integration vs demarcation dynamic translates to actual value polarisation and whether it is related to the changing patterns of media use. The paper explores an original dataset on values and social media use in Europe from the ValCon survey (2021). We use self-declared identification as national/European as an indicator of the communitarian/cosmopolitan cleavage and cluster people accordingly. We then test whether these groups are also distinct in a) support of core democratic values and b) patterns of media consumption. We argue that polarisation in the context of cultural cleavage goes beyond a simple divisive line between the support or opposition to democratic values. Rather, we show that different clusters of values (authoritarian, communitarian, illiberal) are supported/opposed in different ways by these groups, and are related to their distinct patterns of media consumption and seclusion in relatively closed information worlds.