Culture & European attitudes on public debt

Popular media and politicians have often blamed the high public debt of some EU countries on cultural differences. These claims are most apparent in the discourse contrasting ostensibly prudent Northern Europeans with spendthrift Southern Europeans. Despite the prominence of these and similar narratives and evidence that culture plays a nontrivial role in other economic outcomes, there is no systematic evidence that culture influences attitudes towards sovereign debt in the EU. We provide the first empirical test of this claim using over 233,000 responses to a Eurobarometer question about the salience of national debt. Our analysis reveals that national and sub-national differences explain very little of the variance in debt preferences. Further, the differences that do emerge do not fit existing cultural narratives. Additional analysis reveals that established measures of national culture or religious observance, at the national and regional levels, do not correlate with debt attitudes as cultural arguments would predict.