VALUE CHANGE IN EASTERN EUROPE: WHAT IS HAPPENING THERE?
VALUE CHANGE IN EASTERN EUROPE: WHAT IS HAPPENING THERE?

Summary/Abstract: There are not many comparative studies dedicated to value change in Eastern European countries. In our paper, we employ both longitudinal and cross- national analyses to describe and explore whether and, if so, how Eastern European countries have changed their values on the conservatism-openness to change axis. We are using the available EVS/WVS 1990-2009 data sets from Albania, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, East Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine. The main method employed is multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA); we are testing for measurement invariance (configural, metric and scalar) and then compare the means of the latent variables (values). We explore whether we can find overall value convergence or clustering of countries with more or less similar cultural heritages and economic developments or increasing entropy. Our findings suggest that there is neither an overall development towards convergence nor an overall development towards entropy that can be observed in Eastern Europe. What can be observed, however, are processes of partial convergence (i.e. convergence with respect to some of the values) in varying clusters of countries .

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