The Effects of Political Cynicism and National Siege Mentality on the Internalization of an Anti-European Sentiment

This paper aims to provide an insight into the political-psychological understanding of an attitudinal construct labeled anti-European sentiment. A structural equation model for prediction was developed and evaluated by using full information maximum likelihood estimates obtained from LISREL 8.52 computer program. Assumption was that both political cynicism and national siege mentality would have an effect on anti-European sentiment. The data reported here were obtained by standard survey methods on the sample of adult population in Croatia (N=533). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were performed to explore factorial and construct validity of the measures used in this research. CFA yielded unidimensional construct measurements with acceptable fit indices. Structural equation model indicated that exogenous variables (political cynicism, national siege mentality) have significant effects on the anti-European sentiment used as an endogenous (dependent) variable in structural model. Goodness-of-fit indices suggested acceptable fit of the model (RMSEA=0.07, CFI=0.97, NNFI=0.97, SRMR=0.05). Given the amount of variance of anti-European sentiment, it was shown that political cynicism and national siege mentality have strong predictive validity for anti-European sentiment (43 percent of the variance was explained by the structural model). In order to explain the interactions among the latent variables investigated, the author proposed the distrust-threat model of political hostility.