Not so different after all? household attitudes toward financialisation in Germany and the United Kingdom

How do households perceive financialisation? While existing scholarship on household financialisation has investigated financialised household behaviour across advanced economies, this article investigates households’ attitudes toward financialisation. Using a custom survey conducted in Germany and the United Kingdom, we created a ‘credit financialisation index’ based on respondents’ attitudes toward credit-financed spending and the strategic use of assets. Our comparison reveals that there are virtually no differences in such attitudes between German and British households, even though British households tend to borrow much more than German households. Our findings suggest that both countries’ differences in borrowing behaviour are likely the product of both countries’ distinct institutional contexts, such as different credit and welfare regimes, rather than culture or attitudes. The study makes both conceptual and empirical contributions to the scholarship on financialisation in advanced economies.