Culture represents the collective configuration of societal values characteristic of a country’s population (Schwartz, 2004). A value is “a broad tendency to prefer certain states of affairs over others.” (Hofstede, 2001, p. 5). Cultural value evolves slowly with economic growth, industrialization, and globalization (Schwartz, 2004). Economic growth is associated with a pronounced rise in individualism, egalitarian values, tolerance, and trusting norms (Inglehart and Baker, 2000). Technological advances facilitate this transition by altering daily practices and opportunities, thereby reshaping societal norms and individual expectations (Schwartz, 2004). Globalization in the past century has promoted cultural convergence toward dominant global values, such as individualism and tolerance (Beugelsdijk et al., 2015).

Promoting shared cultural values is a key priority for the EU, especially as each enlargement increases cultural diversity (Gerhards, 2010). The Consolidated Treaty on the European Union (2016) states that member states must uphold values such as pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity, and gender equality. The EU promotes these values primarily by encouraging the free movement of people and goods, aligning societal structures, and reducing economic disparities among member states (Akaliyski, 2018).

Researchers have found that the EU has successfully promoted these values among member states. Oshri et al. (2015) showed that support for democratic values in new member states increased steadily with each year of EU membership. Akaliyski and Welzel (2020) found that between 1992 and 2008, the cultural gap between old and new member states narrowed significantly, with new members increasingly adopting the cultural norms of older ones.

However, some research differed in their findings as to whether the EU states are converging their cultural values. For example, Van Houwelingen et al. (2018) found cultural values were diverging among member states. The convergence or divergence of cultural distance within the EU states is conditional on the speed of the change of the old, new and prospective member states. If cultural values of these states change at different speeds, even if they are changing to the same direction, culture divergence would be the result.

Croatia started its social and economic transition toward the EU since the late 1980’s. In the 1990s, its democratic transition coincided with state-building and war (Kasapović, 1996). The government and political elites in that period were preoccupied with the nation state building efforts. In 2001 Croatia began an official EU integration stage lasting for the next twelve years (2001–2013). During this period, Croatia steadily advanced toward the EU, carrying out all necessary reforms and fulfilling criteria for the accession.

The post-accession period since 2013 was characterized by the completion of the transition process as Croatia entered the Schengen zone and adopted the Euro as its national currency. During this time, Croatia developed a relatively open market economy, a multi-party democracy, and advanced rule of law standards. According to data from the World Bank (2022), Croatia’s GDP increased by approximately 3.4% annually over the decade, significantly higher than the EU’s average growth rate of 1.7%.

Research on the transition of cultural values in Croatia is limited and offers inconclusive findings. Rajh et al. (2016) found that Croatians are consistent with EU members in showing low power distance and high individualism. They attributed this change to globalization, which aligns people’s mindsets with those of advanced societies. Similarly, Akaliyski (2018) found that from 2001 to 2008, the newly accepted EU member states, including Croatia, significantly narrowed the cultural gap with older EU members. However, Dabić et al. (2023) examined value changes from 2002 to 2015 and noted that Croatia’s value formation had not adequately aligned with EU common principles and shared values.

Various theories have been developed to study cultural values (e.g., Inglehart and Baker, 2000; House et al., 2004). Among them, Hofstede (1980, 2001) cultural framework is most influential, with over 50 million citations (Venkateswaran and Ojha, 2019). It has been widely applied in fields such as applied psychology (e.g., Zheng et al., 2025), human resource management (e.g., Muleya et al., 2023), and international trade (e.g., Harms and Shuvalova, 2020). Hofstede’s cultural dimensions have been proved to reflect real cultural differences (Kolman et al., 2003). As Hofstede’s theory is still widely used and referred to by researchers and practitioners across disciplines (Beugelsdijk and Welzel, 2018), we adopted it as the analytical framework in this study.

Considering the significant changes in cultural values worldwide, developing new cultural dimension indicators based on Hofstede’s theory is important (Taras et al., 2022; Hahn and Doh, 2025). Large-scale surveys such as the European Social Survey (ESS), have often been chosen to update Hofstede’s findings. The ESS contains basic socio-economic and demographic information of European countries. Combining Hofstede’s theory with ESS data has been profoundly explored (Kaasa et al., 2013, 2014; Kaasa, 2021; Kaasa and Welzel, 2023). Kaasa et al. (2013, 2014) twice combined Hofstede’s theory with ESS data in doing cross-culture study, and theoretically justified the combination of the two later (Kaasa, 2021).

To summarize, the literature review indicates that there has been little systematic analysis of the cultural value transition in Croatia. Kolman et al. (2003) emphasized the need for periodic assessments of value orientations in transitional countries. We aim to address this gap by examining Croatian cultural values from 2010 to 2020. This timeframe strategically captures the decade before and after accession, highlighting the fundamental reforms from a socialist society to an EU member state (Vukadinović, 2013). This study provides insights into the cultural transformation experienced and culture challenges faced by Croatia in the process of Europeanization.

The following hypotheses are based on the influence of economic growth on cultural change in modern societies (Hofstede, 2001; Schwartz, 2004). More importantly we considered value shifts in contextual transformation process of Croatia (Pehe and Sommer, 2022).

To examine the cultural value change over a span of 10 years, we mainly utilized ESS round 5 and 10 datasets collected in 2010/2011 and 2020/2021, respectively. The ESS includes 1,500–2,500 representative samples per country in every round. Beside the data of Croatia, we used the data of 20 EU member states in the ESS datasets as anchors for the study. Following a conventionally used classification method, these members were divided into the old states which joined the EU before 1996, and new states that joined between 2004 and 2013.

To construct latent variables reflecting cultural dimensions, we chose survey questions that while different from those used by Hofstede, still conceptually contain aspects of what Hofstede’s dimensions represent.

PD indicators were chosen with the following consideration: A large PD can be characterized by centralized decision structures, while in the case of small PD the chain of command is not always followed. As in Kaasa et al. (2013), the indicators “Political system allows people to have influence on politics” and “political system allows people to have a say in what government does” were chosen. Moreover, usually in a good democratic society, PD is low, and so the indicators “How satisfied with the way democracy works in country” and “Trust in country’s parliament” were chosen. In the low PD society, people have the chance to participate in social affairs and the process of making decisions are not confined to the minority. Therefore, the indicators “Political system in country ensures everyone fair chance to participate in politics” and “Decisions in country politics are transparent” were chosen.

UA indicators were chosen with the following consideration: Following Kaasa et al. (2013), we chose two indicators showing the importance of behaving properly and the attitude toward sharing customs and traditions: one is “important to do what is told and follow rules” and the other is “important to follow traditions and customs.” The indicators “important to live in secure and safe surroundings” and “important that government is strong and ensures safety” were chosen because they reflect the fact that the population of high uncertainty avoidance societies has a high anxiety level.

The following survey questions were chosen as MAS indicators: “show abilities and be admired,” “get respect,” and “be successful and that people recognize achievements.” These were chosen for being associated with the importance as well as motivation for achievement in masculine societies. In addition, in highly masculine societies, orientation toward money and things prevails over orientation toward people, and earnings are considered to be important. Therefore, the indicator of the importance “to be rich, have money and expensive things” was chosen.

We adopted four variables from Kaasa et al. (2013) as IND indicators: the indicator of the importance to “make one’s own decisions and to be free” reflect aspects of highly individualist societies; a high emphasis on individual initiative is also captured by an indicator of the importance to “think new ideas and being creative.” In addition, individualism is described by the indicators of the importance to “seek fun and things that give pleasure,” and the importance to “have a good time.” These indicators are linked to pleasure and enjoyment that are seen as important in life.

We took four steps to conduct the analysis:

Step one is Factor Analysis. We proceeded with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to evaluate the uniqueness of our chosen items in representing their intended dimensions. CFA was conducted using data from ESS 5 and ESS 10 for Croatia and other 20 EU member states. All assumptions were satisfied: Bartlett’s test (p = 0), KMO (MSA = 0.86), and the scree plot indicated four factors closely aligned with Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The reliability of the factors ranged from 0.76 to 0.95, signifying the psychometric reliability of the chosen items (MacCallum et al., 1999). See Table 1 for detailed information of factor structure of the selected ESS items.

Next, we conducted a correlation analysis. To test the reliability of the ESS culture indicators, we did a correlation analysis of the ESS-based cultural dimensions at the country level with Hofstede’s original findings. Considering that the cultural values of transitional countries might influence the analysis, we utilized only non-transition countries in the ESS datasets for the correlation analysis. It turned out that four dimensions had high correlations, with coefficients ranging as high as 0.47–0.76 for ESS1 and 0.25–0.61 for ESS10. The comparatively lower coefficients concerning ESS 10 can be explained by the changing of culture with the passing of time. See Table 2 for detailed information.

Step three is to address research question one. We calculated Croatia’s cultural values using the culture indicators from ESS 5 and ESS10 respectively, and conducted a T-test to study variations. We did the same analysis for old EU members to better understand the culture variations of Croatia.

Step four is to address research question two. We studied cultural distance change between Croatia and the other EU members. We initially assessed if the distance of each cultural dimension had decreased or not with Equation 1 below:

In Equation 1, x and y represent two countries, and i denotes a specific dimension. The formula calculates the cultural distance between countries x and y on dimension i. Furthermore, we evaluated the multi-dimensional cultural distance between Croatia and the other old EU members, when all dimensions were considered. Since the culture dimensions in Hofstede’s theory can be regarded as a multi-dimensional space, the distance between two countries’ cultures can be measured using the concept of distance between points in multi-dimensional space theory in mathematics, calculated as follows:

In Equation (2), D signifies the distance between two points in a multi-dimensional space; n represents the number of dimensions (in the study, n = 4); x and y denote two points in the multi-dimensional space (in the study, different countries); x_i and y_i represent the values of x and y countries in the dimension i. With the above formulas, we calculated the cultural distance between Croatia and the other EU members in 2010 and 2020, respectively. Lastly, we conducted T-tests to compare if culture distances between Croatia and the other EU members had decreased within 2010–2020.

Figure 1 presents an overview of the variation of cultural values of Croatia during the two survey times. To help interpreting the message, we provided the average cultural value index for the old EU member states (12 observations all together). As shown by Figure 1, in 2010, the mean values of the four culture dimensions for the old EU members were around zero. Compared with the old EU members, in 2010 Croatia had much higher PD (1.35), MAS (0.14), UA (0.16) and lower IND (−0.28).

The comparison between ESS 5 and ESS 10 revealed that ESS-based PD index in Croatia was significantly lowered (by 0.53) in the past decade. So was MAS index, which was lowered by 0.32. IND index was raised by 0.15. UA index had the smallest change, being lowered by 0.10. T-tests showed all these culture variations were significant with p values near 0.000. The findings agreed with our hypotheses 1a-1d.

We calculated the cultural value changes of the old EU members in the same period and observed that the old EU members also experienced significant (p values were from 0.000 to 0.001) decreasing of PD, UA, MAS indexes. The only difference was that the IND index of the old EU states kept stable at 0.05 level in the decade, while IND of Croatia increased significantly. As shown, in 2020, compared with the old EU states Croatia stood out with strikingly high PD index.

To answer question 2, we compared cultural distance between Croatia and 20 EU member states that took part in both ESS 5 and 10. Table 3 presents the results. T-tests confirmed that the only significant cultural distance change occurred in IND, which was significantly shortened (t-value was 2.831; p-value was 0.007). However, for all the other dimensions, no statistically significant differences were observed. Interestingly, an increased PD distance between Croatia and other EU states was implied (t-value was 1.792; p-value was 0.075), which means that PD was decreasing faster in other EU members than Croatia. The multi-dimensional distance calculated using Equation 2 also demonstrated no significant change (t-value was 1.034; p-value was 0.308), as depicted in the last row of Table 3. In summary, our findings did not distinctly support Hypothesis 2. Apart from IND, the cultural distance between Croatia and 20 other EU members did not decrease over the 10-year period.

As we suspect the unchanged cultural distance might be related to the mixture of the old and new EU states, we compared the values of Croatia with those in the old and the new states, respectively. The result showed that no cultural distance change between Croatia and the new EU states was found. With the old EU states, significantly shortened distance was found, once again, in the IND dimension; the distances with all the other dimensions kept stable. We repeated the calculation with the data of ESS 4 and ESS 9, and the findings were the same: no significantly shortened distance could be found except for the IND dimension.

All cultural value change hypotheses (1a–1d) were confirmed: PD, MAS, and UA indices decreased, while the IND index increased. Croatian cultural values are shifting in the same direction as those in the older EU member states. This supports Rajh et al. (2016), who found alignment between Croatian and EU cultural values. However, while Rajh et al. (2016) provided a static image, our study traces the trajectory of this transition.

The significant changes in values across all dimensions suggest that the core values promoted by the EU became more prominent in Croatia by 2020. For example, the decline in the UA index points to increased cultural openness and greater tolerance for alternative lifestyles, indicating a more diversified society. Similarly, the decrease in the MAS index suggests that wealth had become less central, reflecting characteristics typical of more developed societies. Given that the alignment between cultural attitudes and formal social institutions is considered a key factor in successful transitions (Nicoara and Boettke, 2015), the past decade has seen a shift in the mentality of Croats toward values hold by citizens of long-standing EU member states.

The rise in Croatia’s IND index and its narrowing gap with other EU states is noteworthy. This supports Bulog et al. (2024), who found that Croatian culture is increasingly oriented toward individualism, reflecting a growing emphasis on personal autonomy and postmaterialist values, typical of technologically and economically advanced societies. This shift is likely driven by steady economic growth and increased socio-economic integration within the EU, particularly through the tourism sector.

However, Croatia’s PD index remained significantly higher than the average of older EU member states. This aligns with Bianchini’s (2014) finding that Croatian elites were reluctant to relinquish their privileges. The authoritarian legacy of the communist era, compounded by the rise of nationalism during the war of independence, could have contributed to weak public demands for democratic and participatory political culture (Finn, 2019; Maldini, 2016). The persistence of high PD can also be attributed to the incomplete political reforms before accession (Szpala, 2011). The EU highlighted issues such as administrative incompetence, widespread corruption, and a judiciary that lacked independence (Szpala, 2011). After EU accession, the absence of internal constraints and external conditionality allowed the ruling party to exploit structural weaknesses in the system.

Our second hypothesis (H2), stating that Croatia could have shortened cultural distance with other EU member states, was not confirmed. Except for IND, the distance of Croatia and the other EU member states had not significantly changed whether in the aspect of individual dimensions (PD, UA, MAS), or multi-dimensional distance.

Our findings can be explained by Hofstede’s statement regarding the stable feature of national culture. Hofstede (2011, p.21) thought for different nations, its cultural position is stable although value is changing constantly. He argued that “…country scores on the dimensions do not provide absolute country positions, but only their positions relative to the other countries in the set.” This statement is still reliable when the transitional country as the case of Croatia is considered. The stable cultural distance between Croatia and other EU members provides empirical evidence that cultural convergence, as envisioned by the EU, is not seen over the 2010–2020 period. The pace of cultural change in Croatia has been insufficient to reduce its distance from other member states.

This result aligns with Akaliyski et al. (2021), who found that while ex-communist nations have increased support for EU values, the change has been slower than in Western Europe. We even observed a not so significantly enlarged distance of PD in Croatia and the other (mainly the old) EU members. Although PD values are lowering in both Croatia and the old EU members, PD in the old is lowering faster. In addition to historical and cultural legacies, this slow rate of change may be explained by waning enthusiasm for EU integration. Once the external pressures of pre-accession faded, internal incentives in Croatia may have been too weak to sustain further reform (Akaliyski et al., 2021; Vasilopoulou and Wagner, 2017).