European Sociopolitical Mentalities: Identifying Pro- and Antidemocratic Tendencies. Part II – Group (ideological, partisan, regional) perspective

Abstract:

A sequel to an analysis of citizens' predispositions for democracy (Part I), this study focuses on larger units, shared ideologies. European ideologies were explored by secondary data analysis of European Values Study (EVS) wave 4, years 2008–2010, 44 countries, 73 questionnaire items, N = 63,281 respondents. The nature of the ideologies is inviting to cluster analysis approach as they tend to be described in terms of ‘patterned clusters’ and likened to an urban cacophony. We applied cluster analysis to reveal prevalent ideological patterns (pro- and antidemocratic tendencies) within the noise of attitudes, values, and behavioral tendencies of European voters and nonvoters. This time our unit was not an individual citizen but a more general unit, ‘an averaged electoral case’. Each major party and also ‘no party’, ‘other party’, and ‘DK/NA’ categories for each country were represented by an abstracted (non)voter with average opinions (using all 73 variables), producing N = 302 averaged electoral tendencies. These were subjected to hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis. Resulting clusters partitioned Europe into three political regions: active democracy (the north-west; 41% of Europeans, 64.5% democratic), moderate democracy (southern and postcommunist Europe; 48% of Europeans, 21.7% democratic), passive democracy (south-east: Turkey, Romania, Albania, Northern Cyprus; 11% of Europeans, 9.6% democratic). This study thus provided a complementary perspective to the study from Part I (which manifested trans-nationally shared political mentalities of European citizens): European public ideologies manifested regional divides and confirmed the lack of internationally shared public sphere.