Work

Political culture, democratic values and misinformation: Detecting democratic footholds & weaknesses

Year: 2026

Type: dataset

Abstract: This research focuses on identifying socio-psychological types of citizens in the Visegrád Four countries (Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary) and Germany who are susceptible to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and oversimplified explanations of complex social phenomena. The primary objective was to map the incidence of non-democratic attitudes and cognitive biases across populations and to identify specific vulnerable groups (e.g., naïve and alienated types of political culture) in order to design targeted strategies for strengthening resilience against misinformation. The project employed an approach grounded in political and cognitive psychology, with data collected through representative national questionnaire surveys. The methodology combines original research instruments with selected items from the Globsec survey and the World Values Survey, enabling cross-national comparisons. By including Germany as a comparative case, the research extends the generalizability of its findings to the broader Central European context, while respecting both the shared post-totalitarian experience of the V4 region and its internal cultural diversity. The output is a dataset that allows not only for the description of differences between countries but also for the identification of transnational psychological profiles associated with vulnerability to misinformation.

Source: Czech Social Science Data Archive

DOI: 10.14473/csda/j2icpo

Authors: Brezina, Ivan, Klicperová, Martina, Jakab, Zoltan, Przybylski, Wojciech, Boehnke, Klaus, Deutsch, Franziska