Global cultural zones the empirical way: value structure of cultural zones and their relationship with democracy and the communist past

The paper empirically identifies the world’s cultural zones, comprised of the countries with the distinctive patterns of values, and determines their relationship with the country’s communist past and current state of democracy. The analysis is based on the countries’ average values on the two main dimensions of cross-cultural variations: the traditional versus secular-rational and the survival versus self-expression values. The World Values Survey and European Values Study data from 101 countries were used. The K-means method of cluster analysis and the Variance Ration Criterion for determining the final number of clusters were performed. The solution with three clusters appeared as the most appropriate and theoretically meaningful, representing three broad cultural value syndromes. The first value syndrome was defined by low self-expression and high secular-rational values (the zone of secularized authority), the second one by low secular-rational and low self-expression values (the zone of traditional authority), while the third was characterized by high values on both value dimensions (the zone of emancipation). The countries’ cluster membership is highly correlated with the (non-)communist past and the level of socioeconomic development. The countries in three cultural zones significantly differ in terms of the state of democracy: democracy is more fully developed in the countries in the cultural zone of emancipation, and the least developed in the countries with the prevailing traditional authority cultural outlook.