Cultures as networks of cultural traits: A unifying framework for measuring culture and cultural distances

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework using copula graphical models to measure national cultural differences by analyzing both cultural traits and their network structures, providing a comprehensive view of cultural distances.

Contribution

It develops a new methodology combining trait-based and network-based analyses to quantify cultural differences between countries using WVS data.

Findings

Cultural distances are decomposed into trait differences and network structure differences.

The framework captures orthogonal components of cultural distance.

Different national characteristics correlate with trait and network components.

Abstract

Making use of the information from the World Value Survey (WVS), and operationalizing a definition of national culture that encompasses both the relevance of specific cultural traits and the interdependence among them, this paper proposes a methodology to reveal the latent structure of national culture and to measure cultural distance between countries that takes into account both the difference in cultural traits and the difference in the network structure of national cultures. Exploiting the possibilities offered by copula graphical models for discrete data, this paper infers the cultural networks of all the countries included in the WVS (Wave 6) and proposes a novel unifying framework to measure national culture and international cultural distances. The Jeffreys' divergence between copula graphical models, taken as the measure of cultural distance between countries, captures the orthogonality of the two components of cultural distance: the one based on cultural traits and the one based on the network structure among them. Moreover, the two components are shown to correlate with different national and structural characteristics of cultural networks, thus encompassing the different informational sets related to national cultures.