If you are interested in the distribution of value orientations within Europe (Western, Central, Eastern), and if you read German (I know that is a lot to ask for), the following chapter draft might be of interest (PDF). The final version will appear in Silke I. Keil/Jan W. van Deth (Eds.): Deutschlands Metamorphosen. Einheit und Differenzen in europäischer Perspektive. Nomos: Baden-Baden, 2011. And yes, I do realise that this provides a somewhat ironic corollary to my previous post  on the potential futility of political culture research.

Europa als Wertegemeinschaft? Ost und West im Spiegel des „Schwartz Value Inventory“

1 Einleitung und Fragestellung

Werte bzw. Wertorientierungen gehören zu den zentralen Konzepten der vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft. Von Beginn der Umfrageforschung an wurden die Orientierungen gegenüber den zentralen Werten ihrer jeweiligen Gesellschaft immer wieder empirisch untersucht. Seit den 1970er Jahren wurde dabei zumeist auf die von Ronald Inglehart (u. a. 1971; 1989; 1997) entwickelten Konzepte und Instrumente zurückgegriffen, insbesondere auf die verkürzte Variante seiner Wertebatterie („Inglehart-Index“), die nicht nur in zahllosen nationalen, sondern auch in der Mehrzahl der großen internationalen Einstellungsstudien routinemäßig mitläuft (z. B. Eurobarometer, ISSP, EES, EVS, WVS).

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Everyone just seems to know that the voters of the Extreme Right hate foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, but robust comparative evidence for the alleged xenophobia – Radical Right vote link is scarce. Moreover, many of the published analyses are based on somewhat outdated (i.e. 1990s) data, and alternative accounts of the extreme right vote (the “unpolitical” protest hypothesis and the hypothesis that the Far Right in Western Europe attracts people with “neo-liberal” economic preferences, championed by Betz and Kitschelt in the 1990s) do exist. Just a few days ago, a journal has accepted a paper by me in which I test these three competing hypotheses using (relatively) recent data from the European Social Survey and a little Structural Equation Modelling. As it turns out, protest and neo-liberalism have no statistically significant impact on the Extreme Right vote whatsoever. Anti-immigrant sentiment, however, plays a crucial role for the Extreme Right in all countries but Italy. Its effects are moderated by party identification and general ideological preferences. Moreover, the effect of immigrant sentiment is moderate by general ideological preferences and party identification. I conclude that comparative electoral research should focus on the circumstances under which immigration is politicised. Wasn’t it blindingly obvious?

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