Value Politics in the European Union

From Market to Culture and Back

François Foret, Jana Vargovčíková, François Foret, Jana Vargovčíková

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000398694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores what drives value politics and the way in which it redraws political conflict at EU level.

Based on case studies and analyses of statistical data, the book shows what the uses and roles of values have been at EU level over the past decades in both market-related policies and in identity, cultural and morality policies. It challenges the common assumption that the latter is more driven by value conflicts. The research shows the intrinsic similarities between all policy areas regarding the agency and limits of values as drivers of change or continuity. It argues that European values are a broad and flexible symbolic repertoire instrumentalised to serve as a resource for mobilization, legitimation/delegitimation, the conquest and conservation of power.

This book will be of key interest to both scholars and students in European studies/politics, comparative politics, public policy, political theory, sociology and cultural studies, as well as appealing to professionals of European affairs within and around the EU institutions.

Part 1
“Business as usual”?

From the market to society and culture

1
When political competition boosts attitude consistency

The effect of party polarisation on the linkage between economic values and cultural values in Europe

Frédéric Gonthier and Tristan Guerra

Introduction

It is now well established that the structuring of issue positions in Europe is, for voters and parties alike, mostly organised around two dimensions: an economic dimension pointing to the conventional class cleavage between market economy and state regulation and a cultural dimension referring to more or less tolerant views on morality and immigration. Prior research on European party systems has also shown that mainstream parties tend to position themselves consistently on the two dimensions. They associate liberal views – in the American sense, meaning progressive views – on the economy with liberal views on morality and vice versa, thereby encapsulating economic and cultural issues in the unidimensional left-right divide (Knutsen 1995).

In contrast, extreme parties challenge the traditional left-right opposition by catering to voters whose issue preferences are not fully aligned with the underlying liberal-conservative ideological continuum.¹ Specifically, radical right parties have been found to successfully appeal to voters holding left-authoritarian values. To this end, they combine progressive policy positions in the economic realm with conservative positions on morality and immigration issues (de Lange 2007). Most scholars agree that these changes result in increasingly polarised European party systems. The presence and electoral success of extreme parties imply, indeed, higher ideological differences between parties as a consequence of increasing electoral competition (Dalton 2008; Lupu 2015).

Comparative studies on individual value systems also provide some critical insights into the multidimensionality of the political space by showing that economically liberal attitudes and culturally liberal attitudes are more often negatively than positively correlated (Malka et al. 2019). As it turns out, only the most politically sophisticated portions of the electorate associate progressive economic attitudes with progressive moral attitudes and vice versa, hence aligning their policy preferences with the dominant framing of the political debate (Lupton et al. 2015).

One can then wonder whether and how polarised partisan systems influence the way ordinary citizens combine their economic and cultural values. Following Converse’s pioneering work on ideological constraints (1964), the line of argument put forward in this chapter is twofold. First, we contend that party polarisation induces a pressure toward attitude consistency within the electorate (i.e. liberal economic attitudes increasingly correlated with liberal cultural attitudes and vice versa). Second, we posit that this pressure is nevertheless stronger among the most sophisticated citizens who are more likely to receive, pay attention and respond to elite cues. The chapter therefore contributes to putting into dialogue the literature on party systems and the literature on value systems in Europe.

Making sense of the linkage between economic and cultural values

From party systems to value systems: the role of political sophistication

A number of studies have shown that the ideological space in European party systems consists of two major dimensions: the economic dimension and the cultural dimension (Hooghe et al. 2002; Inglehart 1990; Kitschelt 1994). This approach is largely shared by recent research addressing the evolution of party competition (e.g. Hutter and Kriesi 2019; Kriesi et al. 2008) as well as the multidimensionality of mass policy ideology in Europe (Caughey et al. 2019; Lefkofridi et al. 2014). Within this framework, the economic dimension encompasses issues such as taxes, redistribution, free trade and state regulation of business; that is, the socioeconomic underpinnings of the liberal-conservative ideological continuum. In contrast, the cultural dimension captures considerations related to cultural liberalism (e.g. traditional morality, gender equality, compliance with law and order) and immigration issues; that is, the moral facet of the liberal-conservative continuum related to whether people are open to others and tolerant to differences.

From a practical standpoint, the two structural axes of political competition help us understand how ordinary citizens and their more informed counterparts differ in the way they construe their belief systems (Bobbio 1996). While the latter consistently organise their economic and cultural values around a single liberal-conservative ideological continuum corresponding to the left-right opposition, thereby mirroring the elite standards, political beliefs among the general public are for the most part characterised by widespread attitude inconsistency. Why such inconsistency?

This puzzling question takes us back to Converse’s seminal work (1964). According to him, most people are “innocent of ideology” in that they are unable to consistently combine and align their economic and cultural views with the liberal-conservative continuum. Put differently, their belief systems are less “constrained” than are those of the “ideologues”. Converse’s claims stood the test of time (Kinder and Kalmoe 2017). And even though recent studies have tried to make sense of the heterogeneity in the ways individuals structure their political beliefs and found alternative – rather than fully “ideological” or fully “agnostic” – patterns of associations of economic and cultural attitudes among the mass public (Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014; Goldberg 2011), the citizenry still exhibits lower levels of attitude consistency than do the elites.

How can this mismatch be explained? Political scientists have long demonstrated that ordinary citizens are rarely avid consumers of political information (Lazarsfeld et al. 1965; Zaller 1992). Despite the rise of cognitive mobilisation due to the higher educational attainment and greater access to political information (Norris 2011), most people remain largely apathetic on political matters. Even today, only a few individuals are attuned to public affairs. They are often labelled as “sophisticated” citizens (Goren 2012) and described as being more exposed to elite cues, more knowledgeable about politics and more likely to display developed patterns of political thinking.² Similarly, political sophistication is associated with a higher propensity to participate in political activity of any kind (Lachat 2007).

It results from the aforementioned that political sophistication increases people’s ability to consistently organise their economic and political values.³ A large body of research has confirmed Converse’s seminal claim that only the most sophisticated segments of the electorate are capable of coherent and stable policy preferences (Kalmoe 2020; Lupton et al. 2015; Michaud et al. 2009).⁴ In addition, studies examining aggregate opinion dynamics have shown that highly sophisticated individuals are more likely to receive and respond quickly to elite cues. As a consequence, they tend to drive shifts and changes in public opinion since they are the first to update their attitudes in line with elite cues (Erikson et al. 2002; Nicholson 2012; Page and Shapiro 1992). To sum up, only those citizens who are highly interested in politics are prone to connect their economic and cultural values in accordance with the conventional left-right divide.⁵

Explaining and contextualising the negative association between economic and cultural values

What is the direction of the relationship between economic and cultural values? Recent comparative studies have demonstrated that progressive economic attitudes and progressive cultural attitudes are more likely negatively than positively correlated with each other, though this correlation remains modest in magnitude. For instance, individuals are on average more supportive of the welfare state when they are culturally conservative and vice versa (Federico and Malka 2018; Malka et al. 2019).

To make sense of this rather counter-intuitive finding, scholars have argued that economic and cultural value orientations share common psychological antecedents that explain how people bring them together (for a review, see Johnston and Ollerenshaw 2020). Typically, in their famous system-justifying theory of ideologies, Jost et al. (2003, 2009) contend that conservative beliefs are rooted in a psychological need for security and certainty. This need leads individuals to choose the status quo over change to protect themselves from the uncertainties in their external environment. In a complementary fashion, Malka et al. (2014, 2019) recently demonstrated that while the need for security translates into conservative cultural attitudes, it also often results in liberal economic preferences.

To sum up, the need for security takes an expressive form that accounts for moral conservatism and a more instrumental form that is conducive to the demand for material protection. Some scholars emphasised the rise of “left-authoritarians” (Lefkofridi et al. 2014) and “conflicted conservatives” (Ellis and Stimson 2012) among the Western electorate to depict individuals who combine progressive views on economic issues with conservative views on cultural issues. These citizens not only hold attitudes that are incompatible with the conventional political offer, but also find it even more problematic to reconcile their seemingly incongruent economic and cultural views when moral issues become increasingly salient in the public debate, as is the case in many European countries (Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014). Radical right parties have successfully appealed to these cross-pressured voters (de Lange 2007; Gidron 2020). On a more general note, when political parties have clear and distinctive positions on multiple policy issues, citizens who do not fully endorse a party’s position on each and every issue dimension find it more difficult to say where their political loyalties should go. Our first hypothesis aims at verifying the following assumption:

H1. On average, Europeans display a negative association between their (progressive) economic attitudes and their (progressive) cultural attitudes and vice versa.

Comparative studies also suggest that the association between economic and cultural attitudes strongly depends on contextual factors. To begin, modernisation explains much of the cross-national variations. Malka et al. (2019) find that a higher score on the Human Development Index (HDI) mitigates the negative correlation between economic and cultural attitudes, meaning that people are all the more prone to combine progressive economic values and progressive cultural values when they live in a developed country. Conversely, a higher degree of moral traditionalism in the society increases this negative correlation. This result is fully in line with the aforementioned psychological accounts. People from less developed and poorer nations are much more inclined to seek protection and accordingly support liberal economic views, while at the same time endorsing the traditional cultural values prevailing in their society.

Latest research confirms that the negative correlation between economic and cultural values is rather the norm than the exception throughout the world. This is for instance the case in China where people supporting state intervention in the economy also endorse conservative cultural views and vice versa (Pan and Xu 2017). Of course, this is partly due to the authoritarian context and the lack of a full-fledged multiparty system. Still, the Chinese pattern interestingly shows some commonalities with what has long been observed in Eastern Europe. As mentioned earlier, Eastern Europeans tend to associate progressive economic attitudes with conservative cultural attitudes (Duriez et al. 2005; Kossowska and Van Hiel 2003; Malka et al. 2019; Thorisdottir et al. 2007). The magnitude of this correlation, however, is expected to decrease as generation renewal combines with economic development and as rising educational levels lead to an increase in progressive cultural values (Inglehart 2018).

This points to the communist legacy as a second key contextual factor. A common explanation of the negative correlation between economic and cultural values is that Eastern countries have experienced an accelerated transition from communism to political liberalism and capitalist economic systems (Tucker 2002; Whitefield 2002). In such an unsettling environment, it is reasonable to expect that people who favour traditionalism, order and security will more likely associate their moral conservatism with the historically dominant statist and equalitarian ideology.

Interestingly, some scholars have shifted the focus to party politics and argued that the dynamics of dual transition (from state socialism to democracy and to market economy) could have reinforced existing attitudinal patterns. Tavits and Letki (2009) typically note that in Eastern Europe, leftist parties benefited from stronger in...