Anti-Capitalism and Culture in West and East Europe

Julia Zelikova presented her report at the LCSR regular seminar

Julia Zelikova, a LCSR research fellow, presented a report on “Anti-Capitalism and Culture in West and East Europe” at the regular seminar of the LCSR on October 11, 2012.

The key questions of Julia’s research are what the main source of anti-capitalist sentiments in European countries is and what determines the differences in the level of anti-capitalist sentiments between Eastern and Western Europe.

Julia derived main hypotheses of her study from cognitive theory of moral sense developed by Raymond Boudon. The key idea of Boudon’s theory was as follows: “The feeling that X is good is grounded on reasons that can be objectified and formalized and social life is filled with axiological convictions that may seem to be unconscious because they perceived as evident”.

Julia supposed that the reason for anti-capitalism sentiments could be individual sense of justice. Boudon pointed out three types of personal attitudes toward justice, namely “egalitarian point of view”, “meritocratic point of view”, and “patriarchal point of view”. Capitalism is characterized by meritocratic ideology, while majority of people from Post-communist countries have egalitarian or patriarchal sense of justice. Therefore, one can hypothesize that prevailing sense of justice would determine the level of anti-capitalist sentiments in a given country.  

To test that idea empirically Julia used data from the second wave of the World Value Survey. She included 30 European countries in the sample which also was divided into four categories: former USSR republics; former Yugoslav republics; other Post-Communist states; and Western Europe countries.

Julia ran both individual level, country level, and multilevel regression models and presented the most interest findings during the seminar. The individual level analysis showed that older people had higher level of anti-capitalist sentiments. On the contrary, higher-income and high-educated people had low level of anti-capitalism sentiments. That model also demonstrated that sense of justice was the strongest predictor of anti-capitalist attitudes on the individual level. 

Then Julia presented results of the analysis on the country level. Rule of Law index was the main predictor in that model. According to Luc Boltanski, level of sentiments of capitalism depends on quality of democratic institutes and share of people who agree with patriarchal sense of justice in a given country. The model confirmed that hypothesis: the Rule of Law index influenced the level of anti-capitalist sentiment negatively and patriarchal sense of justice influenced level of anti-capitalist sentiment positively.

Finally, multilevel modelling revealed that age, income, egalitarian sense of justice interacted with rule of law had a stronger impact on the level of anti-capitalist sentiments. Differences between post-communist areas and Western Europe could be explained by country fixed  effects. 

by Natalia Gross

 

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