Paper Titles & Abstracts

In this paper, I test the explanatory power of political culture in the context of political values at the core of the international system, with a focus on the Central and Eastern European countries' international development policies. While political culture has been traditionally understood to focus on values, attitudes and orientations towards the state, phenomena such as globalization, regionalization and (European) integration may contest this state-centrism and push for an internationalization of political culture. Within this context and using the last wave of World Values Survey dataset, I explore the effects that key measures of political culture have on respondents' attitudes towards international cooperation for development and to what extent the authoritarian past influences them. More specifically, I investigate how religious postmaterialist predispositions influence individual perceptions and evaluations of the international system, identifying the ways in which different measures of political culture influence attitudes and values towards international development aid. In so doing, I bridge the gap between the comparative study of political culture and a more recent preoccupation in international relations with public opinion and its effects on policy making.