Recreation, Culture and Religion: Trends, Convergences and National Differences in COFOG Architecture

This study aims to capture the place that recreation, culture, and religion occupy in European budgetary architecture, using Eurostat data for 2023 and principal component analysis to reveal the latent structures of public spending. Against the background of the standardization of major social functions, the real stable pillars of the European state, areas with low variance such as defense, environmental protection, health, and social protection have been removed, leaving in the foreground those functions capable of revealing the subtle differences between nations. The results outline two defining axes: one of institutional modernization and cultural capital, the other oriented towards security and economic infrastructure. The States' projection in the factorial dimension provides a suggestive map of Europe, in which cultural and religious expenditures become subtle signals of administrative identity and institutional maturity. The study shows that this area, often discreet in budgetary terms, functions as a revealing indicator of the differences between contemporary European budgetary models.