Professor Zsolt Enyedi from Central European University in Hungary displayed these six specific attitudes and the relationships they made or may have had within the years of 1999 to 2008.
Presented by the Department of Central Eurasian Studies, “The Structure of Political Attitudes in Europe” lecture explored the relationships among authoritarian, religious, xenophobic, socialist, environmentalist and Euroskeptic attitudes in Eastern and Western Europe.
“It is quite plausible that people put together certain attitudes made from propaganda and misleads to form a political ideology,” he said.
Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, politics were dominated by economic issues, Enyedi said. Before this shift, religious issues and the church were recognized as the main issues. Now in the present day, issues of environmentalism, xenophobia and Euroskepticism of European invasion are the main focus of politics, Enyedi said. When all the issues are combined together, six different attitude comparisons arise.
Enyedi displayed comparisons as socialism versus capitalism, traditionalism versus permissiveness (progressivism), Euroskepticism versus Euroenthusiasm (including European integration), xenophobia versus impartialism, religion versus sexualism and environmentalism versus anti-?environmentalism.
Following this display, Enyedi showed how these attitudes can be shown in a variety of perspectives.
“Anything can happen in principle,” Enyedi said. “A citizen’s way of thinking is much less ideological than the elite.”
Looking at a one-dimensional model, Enyedi said he believes it to be the most simple. This model would polarize the left libertarian and the right authoritarian. In contrast, a two-dimensional model would compare the economic left and right in two directions and then the cultural left and right in the other two directions, creating an overlap in the middle.
Enyedi compared the statistical diagrams of the data collected using scalar invariance. All data was collected from politically elite individuals in order to show the ideal factors of the different attitude interactions.
Enyedi compared the issues to find correlations between each pair. For example, environmentalism and xenophobia displayed a negative relationship. Therefore, according to the data, people who care about the environment are less partial to biases within the society.
“New politics provide the new divide, the new picture that breaks up the community,” Enyedi said.
The data showed attitudes and relationships between them do not change much within a decade. The six-factor model works best, especially considering the fact that each country is being weighed equally.
It is possible to display a five-factor model if Euroskepticism and xenophobia are combined together. In addition, when it comes to religion, attitudes can easily change among countries.
“We can reduce the number of dimensions when describing the difference between left and right,” he said.
Simpler political attitudes in general are needed to allow political success for these countries in the future, Enyedi said.
New politics, modernism and socialism are considered second-order dimensions. Xenophobia, Euroskepticism and left-right politics are considered fundamentally harvested by socialism. Everything falls within the six different factors.
“I’m not sure if we have found the holy grail of political attitudes, but we may have a more coherent way of thinking,” Enyedi said.
