Popular Explanations of Poverty in Europe: Effects of Contextual and Individual Characteristics across 28 European Countries

In this contribution we describe and explain the differences in popular poverty attributions that exist within and between 28 European countries. On the basis of the existing literature we distinguish five predictors: awareness of the existence of poverty, personal experience of disadvantage, personal values, socio-demographic background and structural and cultural country-level characteristics. Using data from the European Values Survey (EVS) 1999/2000, we assess for most of these predictors the extent to which they relate directly to people’s partial ranking of popular poverty attributions. The results of rank-ordered logistic regression models show that differences in popular poverty explanations relate directly to whether one lives in a country with a Catholic tradition and a high level of poverty, their (subjective) experience of disadvantage and personal values. Furthermore, we find that the size of the various associations depends on people’s particular choices of poverty explanations.