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Populism, Extremism and Cultural Change as Traceable in the European Value Study

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Producing Cultural Change in Political Communities

Part of the book series: Contributions to Political Science ((CPS))

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Abstract

Political culture seems to have changed in many Western democracies since Inglehart’s findings about materialism and post-materialism. The European Values Study can trace attitude distributions back to 1981 till 2019. A study series like this one—with identical questions about a wide range of issues—allows for first defining an attitude space common to all countries which the EVS targeted and then showing changes over time and differences between countries and generations. The results will contribute to a deepened understanding of the attitude space in which European policy makers have to define policies. Differences between countries are generally smaller than could have been expected from the different history of Western and Eastern Europe during the past four decades—but they still exist. A common result of all analyses is that European societies seem to be composed of large moderate majorities at whose margin vivid and sometimes radical minorities exist.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a few countries, newer information was made available in World Values Survey Wave 7 (Haerpfer et al., 2022b, 2022a) after most of the calculations for this paper had been completed. These data are not included in the analyses of this chapter.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsinformatik (Retired), Universität Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany

    Klaus G. Troitzsch

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  1. Klaus G. Troitzsch
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Correspondence to Klaus G. Troitzsch .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Law, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

    Holger Mölder

  2. Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Camelia Florela Voinea

  3. Estonian Military Academy, Tartu, Estonia

    Vladimir Sazonov

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Troitzsch, K.G. (2023). Populism, Extremism and Cultural Change as Traceable in the European Value Study. In: Mölder, H., Voinea, C.F., Sazonov, V. (eds) Producing Cultural Change in Political Communities. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43440-2_7

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