The series of recent crises (EURO, refugees, backsliding, Brexit) challenge the self-portrayal of the European Union (EU) as a community of shared values. Against this backdrop, we analyse European Values Study data from 1990 till 2020 to assess the level and change in publics’ acceptance of the EU’s officially propagated values: personal freedom, individual autonomy, social solidarity, ethnic tolerance, civic honesty, gender equality and liberal democracy. We find that EU publics support these values strongly and increasingly over time. The EU-member publics are also remarkably distinct culturally from Eastern European non-EU-nations, especially concerning individual freedoms and gender equality. Simultaneously, however, member nations internalize EU-values at different speeds – alongside traditional religious fault lines that continue to differentiate Europe – in the following order from fastest to slowest: (1) Protestant, (2) Catholic, (3) Ex-communist and (4) Orthodox countries. In conclusion, the EU writ large evolves into a distinct value-sharing community at different speeds.

Various models of subjective culture (measures of self-reports) have been proposed since Hofstede’s original work but none of them have been validated by showing that they have analogs in objective culture (measures of societal practices). Inspired by Bardi and Schwartz’s discovery that Schwartz’s individual-level circumplex values model has an exact equivalent in a model of behaviors, we develop a test for the purpose of validating models of culture. We apply this test to Minkov’s revised two-dimensional variant of Hofstede’s subjective-culture model, consisting of individualism-collectivism (IDV-COLL) and flexibility-monumentalism (FLX-MON) (formerly “long-term orientation”), as Fog recently found that an analog to this model incorporates and summarizes all major validated models and dimensions of national culture. We analyze national measures of important social practices associated empirically and theoretically with IDV-COLL and FLX-MON: transparency-corruption, gender equality, political freedom, road death tolls, homicide rates, family structures, innovation rates, and educational effort and achievement. These yielded close analogs to IDV-COLL and FLX-MON, with similar factor structures across nations and across the 50 US states, explicable in terms of IDV-COLL, FLX-MON, and life-history strategy (LHS) theories. Thus, subjective culture structures have mirror images in objective culture structures. This provides validation for our test, for the Minkov-Hofstede two-dimensional model of culture, for the use of nations and some sub-national political entities as units of cultural analysis, as well as for IDV-COLL, FLX-MON, and LHS theories.

Are investors in electoral authoritarian regimes discriminated against for political activism? In this paper, we implement a simple experiment to test whether affiliation with the ruling party or the political opposition affects the probability that investors receive advice from investment promotion agencies in Russian regions. Between December 2016 and June 2017, we sent 1504 emails with a short question and a number of randomized treatments to 188 investment promotion agencies in 70 Russian regions. Although investment promotion agencies are nominally depoliticized in Russia, we find that switching the political affiliation of a potential investor from the opposition party “Yabloko” to the government party “United Russia” on average increases the chances to receive a reply by 30%. The effect strongly depends on regional levels of political competition, with higher levels of discrimination in regions that are less politically competitive.

This chapter summarizes the main findings presented in the volume. The volume investigates similarity of social capital and well-being trends in different geographical locations and test stability of associations between social capital, well-being and their determinants across time-points, countries and regions. Overall, the book further contributes in the field in several directions. First, it allows to trace the impact of communist legacy on social capital in the long run. Second, it discovers the role of exogenous shocks and turbulent times on erosion and reviving of social capital and well-being. Third, it reveals how country conditions change the roots of social capital and shape relations between social capital and well-being.

Co-playing, or playing video games together, is a social practice that enriches relationships and game experience by providing the players with informational and social support. This study explores how co-playing integrates into friendship in two small (6–7 people), male communities of adolescent and adult friends. Both communities are local and school-based; both focus on co-playing Dota 2. The study focuses on the leadership in these small networks, compares their co-playing patterns, and the ways in which co-playing affects the relationships in both communities, enhancing their bonding social capital. We apply network analysis and personal interviews to compare and contrast how the co-playing communities emerged, are maintained and evolve along with the friendship. The main conclusion is that such co-playing communities emerge around a single Dota 2 enthusiast in the early secondary school as a common pastime, but co-playing video games increases bonding social capital among the community members. Network analysis demonstrates the differences in leadership in the teen and adult communities. The research shows how video games are embedded in collective everyday friendship and how co-playing communities function in support of such a relationship. The findings could be further tested against female and mixed co-playing communities.

This paper focuses on the relationship between film content and human values in Europe. Our research fills in two research gaps. For one thing, it reveals the links between people’s values and visual cultural production that can showcase the effects of changing values on culture. The other part of our research concerns the use of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) as a data set reflecting changes in modern societies. We track the changes in film topics provided by the IMDb and European Values Study (EVS) data to see how the changes in people’s values are linked to the popularity of related topics. Our special focus lies on the link between choice values and the probability of nudity depiction in films. The sample contained all European countries across 1960-2013. Using multilevel regression analysis, we found that the probability of female nudity is associated with the level of choice values, whereas male nudity is more likely to appear in films related to the topic of homosexuality.

We present the reaction of the EU and eight member states to the refugee crisis 2015/16 as a case of ‘defensive integration’. In the absence of a joint EU solution, the member states were left to their own devices and took a series of national measures that varied from one country to the other, depending on their policy heritage, and the combination of problem pressure and political pressure which they were facing. As a result, debordering responses prevailed at first. Only in a second stage a set of national and EU measures aiming at internal and external re-bordering were introduced. At this stage, destination states proved to be the most important drivers of a joint solution, with Germany taking the lead. The overall outcome is an example of ‘defensive integration’, aiming squarely at joint solutions to stop the refugee flow outside the EU but not to manage it inside the EU.

Recent accounts of democratic backsliding are negligent about the cultural foundations of autocracy-vs-democracy. To bring culture back in, I demonstrate that (1) the countries’ membership in culture zones explains some 70% of the global variation in autocracy-vs-democracy and (2) that this culture-bound variation has remained astoundingly constant over time – in spite of all the trending patterns in the global distribution of regime types over the last 120 years. Furthermore, the explanatory power of culture zones over autocracy-vs-democracy roots in the cultures’ differentiation on “authoritarian-vs-emancipative values.” Against this backdrop, lasting regime turnovers happen as a corrective response to glacially accruing regime-culture misfits – driven by generational value shifts into a pre-dominantly emancipatory direction. Consequently, the backsliding of democracies into authoritarianism is limited to societies in which emancipative values remain under-developed. Contrary to the widely cited deconsolidation-thesis, the prevalent generational profile in people’s moral orientations exhibits an almost ubiquitous ascension of emancipative values that will lend more, not less, legitimacy to democracy in the future.

The nation-building literature of the early 1960s argued that decolonized countries need to overcome pre-colonial ethnic identities and generate national cultures. Africa is the most critical test case of this aspect of modernization theory as it has by far the largest ethnolinguistic fractionalization. We use data from the Afrobarometer to compare the cultures of 85 ethnolinguistic groups, each represented by at least 100 respondents, from 25 African countries. We compared these groups and their nations on items that address cultural modernization and emancipation: ideologies concerning inclusive-exclusive society (gender egalitarianism, homophobia, and xenophobia), submissiveness to authority, and the societal role of religion. Previous research has shown that these are some of the most important markers of cultural differences in the modern world. Hierarchical cluster analysis yielded very homogeneous national clusters and not a single ethnolinguistic cluster cutting across national borders (such as Yoruba of Benin and Yoruba of Nigeria, Ewe of Ghana, and Ewe of Togo, etc.). Only three ethnolinguistic groups (3.5%) remained unattached to their national cluster, regardless of the clustering method. The variation between nations (F values) was often considerably greater than the variation between ethnolinguistic groups. Medial distances between the groups of each country correlated highly with GDP per person (r = −.54), percentage men employed in agriculture (r = .64), percentage men employed in services (r = −.63), and phone subscriptions per person (r = −.61). In conclusion, economic development and modernization diminish cultural differences between ethnolinguistic groups within nations, highlighting those between them.