Who Believes Slovakia Is Backward? Politics and Class in Slovak Backwardness Narratives

This article examines the social and political distribution of “backwardness narratives” in Slovakia, which portray the country as culturally or civilizationally lagging behind the West. Such narratives are commonly attributed to upper-class or middle-class discourse and criticized as a form of self-orientalization, yet their actual distribution across the population has rarely been tested empirically. Drawing on original representative survey data collected in May 2024 and a triangulation strategy including logistic regression, hierarchical cluster analysis, and multiple correspondence analysis, we find that belief in Slovak backwardness is only weakly associated with class proxies such as income, education, or urban residence. Instead, it is strongly influenced by political orientation: liberal and pro-European voters are much more likely to endorse these narratives, while nationalist, sovereigntist, and left-conservative voters tend to reject them. Material circumstances, however, predict whether respondents take a position at all, with the economically insecure more likely to remain ambivalent; among those who do, political identity predicts which one. These findings suggest that backwardness narratives have moved beyond their class origins to function primarily as symbolic markers of political identity, structuring the cultural boundaries of competing social blocs in Slovakia’s polarized public sphere.