Exploring the limits and boundaries between cultural practices and political values in contemporary Finland

Abstract

Cultural practices are indisputably socially stratified. At the same time, they are also connected to political values. Existing research has indicated that these two are linked, often pointing to the direction of a negative relation between more conservative attitudes and cultural capital. The aim of this paper is to examine how political values and cultural practices are intertwined in our era of ‘new politics’, in which cultural and social values have an increasing importance. Our paper disentangles this question in the light of qualitative interview data. Our empirical context is Finland, which has been found to have largely similar cultural and political differentiation than other Western societies. Our analysis identifies four different articulations showing how the cultural and the political intertwine.