Cultures as networks of cultural traits: a unifying framework for measuring culture and cultural distances

Using data from the sixth wave of the World Value Survey and operationalising a definition of national culture that emphasises both specific cultural traits and the inter-dependence among them, this paper proposes a methodology to reveal the latent network structure of every national culture and to measure the cultural distance associated with every pair of countries as a Jeffreys’ divergence between copula graphical models. The two components of this new measure of cultural distance show different correlations with measures of geographical, historical, economic, and political distance among countries and with the similarity in the topologies of the countries cultural networks.