The Mental Map of National Hierarchy in Europe.

Abstract

We theorize that people's perceptions of national hierarchy are aligned not only with longstanding cultural schemas of development but also with schemas of cultural wealth. We use data from the Nation Brands Index surveys to examine how European publics' evaluate their own country and other European countries across many attributes. We find that European publics rank northwest European countries highest on developmental attributes and southwestern European nations highest on cultural attributes, while they rank eastern European countries lowest in both categorizations. Moreover, we show that publics' rankings of countries load to two related yet distinct factors, the contents of which closely reflect schemas of development and cultural wealth. This evidence suggests that these two distinct schemas are simultaneously present in Europeans' perceptions of national hierarchy.