A measure of the distance between countries based on individual data

We present a new method for evaluating the relative distance between any two countries, among several, on the basis of individual data. First, clusters of respondents are formed and the proportions of each country’s respondents who belong to the various clusters are calculated. 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 Euclidean distance between the observed distributions provides a measure of the distance between countries. The method is applied to the 21 European countries of the WVS (World Value Survey) for the years 1994-2007, first by “domain” (opinions and attitudes on, e.g., religion, politics, and family), and then globally.