Consumer ethnocentrism in an everyday food-consumption context : a cross-country analysis using exploratory graph analysis

Abstract

Consumer ethnocentrism continues to play a central role in shaping food-related consumption attitudes, yet its internal structure and contextual variability remain debated, particularly across European countries. This study examines consumer ethnocentrism in a common everyday food-consumption setting, using apples as a familiar and comparable reference product across three European countries (the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Italy), representing distinct cultural and economic environments. Using a unified survey design (N = 1814), the study employs exploratory graph analysis to investigate the dimensional structure and stability of ethnocentric attitudes. The results indicate that while a general ethnocentric tendency can be identified across countries, consumer ethnocentrism appears to differ not only in observed intensity but also in internal organisation. There are country-specific clustering patterns among items of ethnocentrism, suggesting that moral obligation, emotional attachment, and economic concerns vary in salience across national contexts. The results also show that pragmatic, job-protective aspects of domestic preference are widely shared, while extreme or punitive expressions of ethnocentrism receive limited support across all countries. Sociodemographic effects exhibit heterogeneous patterns: age, education, and gender influence ethnocentrism differently across national samples, whereas subjective financial strain is only weakly but consistently associated with ethnocentric attitudes. The findings highlight the multidimensional and context-dependent nature of consumer ethnocentrism and demonstrate the added value of network-based approaches for cross-country measurement and comparison in food-related consumer research. Furthermore, the results have implications for international food markets, indicating that origin-related attitudinal responses are shaped by country-specific attitudinal structures rather than uniform ethnocentric tendencies.