Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Implications for political culture

Andrew J. Orzel who teaches in Alexandria, VA, posted, on the College Board discussion list (thank you, Andrew), a link to this Pew Research Center poll. The poll results might be a way of opening discussion about comparative government and politics. There are many bits of data and implications for politics and policies. It would have been preferable to have some Eastern European, Asian, African, and Latin American countries considered, but this task is huge already.

There is a good section on the polling methodology and it's possible to download a PDF version of the full report.

The American-Western European Values Gap

As has long been the case, American values differ from those of Western Europeans in many important ways. Most notably, Americans are more individualistic and are less supportive of a strong safety net than are the publics of Britain, France, Germany and Spain. Americans are also considerably more religious than Western Europeans…

These differences between Americans and Western Europeans echo findings from previous surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center. However, the current polling shows the American public is coming closer to Europeans in not seeing their culture as superior to that of other nations…

These are among the findings from a survey by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, conducted in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Spain from March 21 to April 14 as part of the broader 23-nation poll in spring 2011…

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