A Measure of the Cultural Distance Between Countries

We present a new method for evaluating the relative distance between any two countries, among several, using individual data. We form clusters of respondents and we calculate the proportions of each country's respondents who belong to the various clusters. Assuming that respondents in the same cluster are similar to one another and that two countries are close to each other when their nationals distribute similarly among clusters, the dissimilarity between countries can be expressed in terms of Euclidean distances between the observed distributions (the square root of the sum of the squared differences between the proportions of nationals in the same cluster). We test the method on the World Value Survey (WVS) dataset for the years 1994-2007, first separately, by "domain'' (opinions and attitudes on, e.g., religion, politics, and family), and then on all of the (selected) variables together. Groups of assumedly similar countries (the Baltic, the Nordic and the Mediterranean countries) turn out to be closer to each other than do, on average, any two European countries picked at random, which lends credibility to the method. Its pros and cons are discussed in the final section.