Foreword
Pushing the Envelope – Analyzing the
Impact of Values
Marita R. Inglehart
In a sense, this book began when Ronald Inglehart went to Paris in May 1968
to investigate the causes of a student uprising that had just paralyzed France.
He mounted a representative national survey of the French public that probed
into the motivations underlying the greatest mass uprising since World War II
and why the Gaullist government that had opposed it was returned to power
by a majority of French voters in subsequent national elections.
When he began to analyze the results, Inglehart was surprised: the data
contradicted his expectations. Like most observers – including the strikers and
demonstrators themselves – he assumed that the May 1968 uprising was a manifestation
of class conflict. Paris was covered with posters attacking capitalist
exploitation; French intellectuals interpreted the events in Marxist terms, and
the participants used standard Marxist slogans about class struggle. Accordingly,
Inglehart initially struggled to make the findings fit Marxist expectations.
New elections were held a month after the strikes and demonstrations. His data
showed that instead of heightened class polarization, with the proletariat supporting
the parties of the Left and the bourgeoisie rallying behind General de
Gaulle, a large share of the working-class voters had shifted to support the
Gaullist ruling party, contributing to its victory. It was mainly middle-class
voters who moved in the opposite direction.
Seeking to understand why this happened, Inglehart analyzed the responses
to an open-ended question that asked about the goals of those who had taken
part in the strikes and demonstrations. The motivations varied sharply by age
and social class. Working-class respondents, especially the older ones, overwhelmingly
mentioned higher salaries. Middle-class respondents, especially
the younger ones, said they wanted a freer, less impersonal society. Inglehart
hypothesized that these age and class differences reflected a process of intergenerational
value change linked with the economic miracles of the postwar
era.
xix
xx Foreword
He reasoned that, throughout history, most people have grown up experiencing
economic and physical insecurity. Germany was a particularly striking
example that quickly caught Inglehart’s attention right after his visits to France.
In Germany, the older generations had experienced deprivation and loss of life
during World War I, followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, and then
defeat, occupation, and liberation during World War II. The postwar era, by
contrast, brought historically unprecedented levels of economic and physical
security. During the two decades before 1968, Germany experienced the highest
economic growth rates in its history. This economic development, combined
with the emergence of the modern welfare state, meant that for the first time in
history, a large part of the population had grown up in a society where starvation
was virtually unknown. A large part of the postwar generation no longer
gave top priority to economic security, instead placing growing emphasis on
autonomy and freedom of expression.
A society’s basic values, of course, do not change overnight, and older
generations continued to emphasize the materialistic goals that had shaped
them during their formative years. But the more secure strata of the postwar
generation gave higher priority to “postmaterialist” goals, as Inglehart called
them.
The student protesters in France, Germany, and elsewhere in the Western
world indicated the political emergence of the postwar generation. Although
their formative conditions had been present for years, this generation did not
become old enough to have an impact on politics until the 1960s, when they
were university students. Eventually they would occupy the leading positions
in society, but initially they saw themselves as having values that were sharply
different from those of their elders. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” was a
widespread slogan. When postmaterialists first emerged as a political force,
they tended to express themselves in Marxist slogans, which were then the
standard rhetoric of protest in Western Europe. To a large extent, the term
“Left” meant the Marxist parties, and it was natural for the postmaterialists
to assume that they were Marxists. But in fact there were profound differences
between the goals of the postmaterialists and those of the Marxist Left, as the
postmaterialists gradually discovered.
In 1970, Inglehart tested his postmaterialist value change theory in a sixnation
survey of European attitudes with a battery of questions he had explicitly
designed to measure materialist versus postmaterialist values. In all six
countries (Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands),
there were massive differences between the values of young and old
respondents. Among those older than sixty-five, materialists outnumbered postmaterialists
by a margin of fourteen to one; but among the postwar generation,
postmaterialists were more numerous than materialists. Moreover, within each
birth cohort, postmaterialists were much more heavily represented among the
economically secure strata than among the less-educated and lower-income
groups. The article reporting these findings was published in 1971 in the
Foreword xxi
American Political Science Review, and the concept of postmaterialism entered
the vocabulary of modern political science.1
Several critics argued that the dramatic value differences between age groups
reflected life-cycle effects rather than generational change. Data from a long
time series would be needed to answer this question. The four-item materialistpostmaterialist
values battery was included in the Eurobarometer surveys
beginning in 1973 and was continued for decades. This made it possible to
carry out cohort analyses based on data covering a long time series. The results
confirmed that a process of intergenerational value change was taking place:
given birth cohorts did not become more materialist as they grew older, and
as younger cohorts gradually replaced older ones in the adult population, the
society as a whole became increasingly postmaterialist. In addition, the wealth
of the data in the Eurobarometer studies enabled survey researchers to examine
the range of attitudes and behaviors linked to postmaterialist value change,
stimulating a growing body of research on this topic.
The research agenda on value change in contemporary societies continued
to expand. In 1973, Inglehart developed a broader-based twelve-item battery.
With Samuel Barnes, Max Kaase, Warren Miller, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, and
Alan Marsh, he helped design the Political Action study, which demonstrated
the link between value change and new forms of political action such as protests,
petitions, sit-ins, and various other manifestations of contentious action.2
The concept of postmaterialist values has become a standard term in social
science (in 2014, a Google Scholar search on “postmaterialist values” produced
more than 15,000 citations). But in subsequent research, Inglehart found that
the value shift he first measured in 1970 was part of a much broader process
of intergenerational cultural change linked with modernization.3
Materialistpostmaterialist
values were just one component of a broader dimension of
cross-cultural variation, which he called survival–self-expression values. Selfexpression
values give high priority to environmental protection, tolerance of
out-groups, gender equality, and emphasis on participation in decision making
in economic and political life. These values reflect mass polarization over gender
equality and individual freedoms, which are part of a broader syndrome of
tolerance of out-groups, including foreigners and gays and lesbians. The shift
1 R. Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial
Societies,” American Political Science Review 65 (1971): 991–1017; R. Inglehart, The Silent
Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
2 S. H. Barnes, M. Kaase, K. Allerbeck, F. Heunks, R. Inglehart, M. K. Jennings, et al., Political
Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979).
3 R. Inglehart, Culture Shift (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); R. Inglehart, Modernization
and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); P. Abramson and R. Inglehart, Value Change
in Global Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); R. Inglehart and W.
Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Change and the Persistence of Traditional Values,” American
Sociological Review 65 (2000): 19–51.
xxii Foreword
from survival values to self-expression values also includes a shift in childrearing
values, from an emphasis on hard work and conformity to social norms
toward emphasis on imagination and tolerance as important values to teach a
child. Plus it goes with a rising sense of subjective well-being that is conducive
to tolerance, trust, political moderation, and expressive political action – all of
which are conducive to democracy.
Building on this revised view of modernization, Inglehart, in collaboration
with various colleagues, particularly Christian Welzel and Pippa Norris, developed
the evolutionary modernization theory. Departing from earlier versions of
modernization theory, it abandons simplistic assumptions of linearity.4
Instead,
it emphasizes that modernization is reversible and can change direction. Thus,
the transition from agrarian to industrial society was linked with a cultural
shift from “traditional” to “secular-rational values,” which made the emergence
of “electoral democracy” possible, although by no means inevitable.
Then, the transition from industrial to postindustrial society brought a shift in
a very different direction: from “survival” to “self-expression values,” which
makes “liberal democracy” increasingly likely. This theory also moves from
a narrow focus on changes in objective socioeconomic conditions to examine
changes in people’s subjective beliefs and the impact of these beliefs on regime
institutions and public policies. Finally, this theory recognizes the enduring
impact of a society’s historic heritage, as is manifest in the robust global cultural
zones based on religious and colonial experiences: economic development
tends to change a society’s culture in roughly predictable ways. But the process
is path dependent: the fact that a society was historically Protestant, Catholic,
Orthodox, Muslim, or Confucian continues to shape its people’s values today.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that rising economic and physical security tends
to erode the rigid cultural norms that characterized agrarian societies, leading
to norms that allow greater individual autonomy and free choice. Strikingly
similar findings have been reported by researchers in other disciplines from
anthropology to biology. Thus, Gelfand and colleagues find that nations that
encountered severe ecological and historical threats have stronger norms and
lower tolerance of deviant behavior than do other nations, arguing that existential
pressures determine whether a culture is tolerant of deviance.5
Similarly,
Thornhill and colleagues find that historic vulnerability to infectious disease
is linked with collectivist attitudes, xenophobia, and low support for gender
equality – all of which hinder the emergence of democracy.6
4 R. Inglehart and P. Norris, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the
World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); P. Norris and R. Inglehart, Sacred and
Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, expanded 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2011); R. Inglehart and C. Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The
Human Development Sequence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
5 M. J. Gelfand, J. L. Raver, L. Nishii, L. M. Leslie, J. Lun, B. C. Lim, et al., “Differences between
Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study,” Science 27 (2011): 1100–4.
6 R. Thornhill, C. Fincher, and D. R. Murray, “Zoonotic and Non-zoonotic Diseases in Relation
to Human Personality and Societal Values,” Evolutionary Psychology 8 (2010): 151–55.
Foreword xxiii
Inglehart’s theory of postmaterialism and the revised theory of modernization
that developed from it continue to be the basis of evolving theories. Recent
extensions include Welzel’s general theory of emancipation7
as well as Dalton
and Welzel’s allegiance-assertion theory, pursued in this volume, which postulates
a shift from allegiant to assertive types of citizens. The underlying logic
connecting this lineage of theories is that increasing existential security, cognitive
mobilization, and other opportunity-widening aspects of modernization
tend to make people more self-directed and to shift their emphasis on freedom
of choice and equality of opportunities. These values fuel various social movement
activities that advocate gender equality, tolerance of gays and lesbians,
and participatory democracy throughout societal life.
In 1973, Jacques-Ren´e Rabier launched the Eurobarometer surveys and had
the foresight to include the materialist-postmaterialist values in a long-term
program of monitoring the attitudinal component of social change. This made
it possible to test these ideas empirically and to modify and build on them to
improve our understanding of how people’s beliefs and goals are changing.
Rabier is one of the unsung heroes of cross-national survey research. He not
only launched the Eurobarometer surveys but also inspired and supported other
cross-national survey research programs such as the Latino Barometer, the Afro
Barometer, and the East Asia Barometer. He also helped design the European
Values Study, launched in 1981 by Jan Kerkhofs and Ruud de Moore, which
was carried out by the same survey institutes that did the Eurobarometer and
included many of its key indicators, such as materialist-postmaterialist values
and unconventional political action measures from the Political Action Surveys.
Later, de Moor and Kerkhofs invited Inglehart to help expand the European
Values Study (EVS) into a global survey project that in 1990 became the World
Values Survey (WVS). In 1995, Inglehart launched a new wave of the WVS
on his own, and in 1999, the EVS and WVS were established as two separate
groups, which continue to cooperate, sharing key batteries of items to build
up an unprecedented time series for the analysis of value change. Kerkhof’s
and de Moor’s work has been carried on with great success by Paul de Graaf,
Loek Halman, Jaak Billiet, Jacques Hagenaars, and their colleagues, covering
virtually every country in Europe.
The WVS is the most important research project of Inglehart’s career. In
discussing the WVS, he is clearly expressing his appreciation and gratitude
for having been able to work with such colleagues as Miguel Basanez, Russell
Dalton, Jaime D´ıez-Nicol ´as, Juan D´ıez-Nicol ´as, Yilmaz Esmer, Christian
Haerpfer, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Marta Lagos, Shen Mingming, Alejandro
Moreno Alvarez, Neil Nevitte, Pippa Norris, Thorleif Pettersson, Bi Puranen,
Catalina Romero, Sandeep Shastri, Christian Welzel, Seiko Yamazaki, and
many other colleagues in the WVS network. These people, from countries
7 C. Welzel, Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).
xxiv Foreword
around the world, have played key roles in carrying out the WVS, analyzing
the data, and presenting the findings in publications and conferences around
the world. A project of this scope requires people with diverse talents to design,
organize, fund, analyze, archive, interpret, and publish findings from this study
of social change in more than 100 countries, extending over 30 years. The
WVS is diverse not only in talented people but also geographically. The WVS
secretariat is based in Stockholm, the archiving is carried out in Madrid, and
analysis and interpretation of the data are pursued by thousands of researchers
in scores of countries around the world.
In codesigning the WVS, Inglehart emphasized a strategy of diversity, trying
to cover the widest possible range of societies. This was a deliberate strategic
choice. He was aware that a more cautious approach would have been to limit
the data collection to countries with well-developed survey infrastructures,
ensuring that fieldwork was carried out by experienced survey institutions. But
this would have meant limiting the survey’s coverage mainly to prosperous
democracies. He was convinced that it was a better overall strategy to push
the envelope, maximizing the economic, political, and cultural diversity of
the countries covered. This approach greatly increases the analytic leverage
that is available for analyzing the role of culture, economic development, and
democratic versus authoritarian institutions. But it also tends to increase the
possible error in measurement. This is a difficult balancing act, and it is an
empirical question whether the gains offset the potential costs.
Extending survey research into developing countries means doing it in places
where the infrastructure is less developed and the margin of error is likely to
be higher. This raises the question: Is it possible to obtain accurate measures of
mass beliefs and values in low-income countries and authoritarian states where
survey research is rare? Or is the error margin so large as to render the data
useless for comparative analysis? There is no a priori answer to this question; it
requires empirical testing. Inglehart and Welzel conducted some relevant tests.8
They theorized that self-expression values should be strongly correlated with
indicators of economic development. Thus, they compared the strength of the
correlations obtained from high-income societies with the strength of those
obtained from all available societies. Here two effects work against each other:
(1) the presumed loss of data quality that comes from including lower-income
societies, which would tend to weaken the correlations; and (2) the increased
analytical leverage that comes from including the full range of societies, which
should strengthen the correlations. Which effect is stronger? They found that
among high-income societies, the average correlation between self-expression
values and ten widely used economic development indicators was 0.57, whereas
across all available societies, the average correlation is 0.77. The data from all
8 R. Inglehart and C. Welzel, “Changing Mass Priorities: The Link between Modernization and
Democracy,” Perspectives on Politics 8 (2010): 551–67.
Foreword xxv
available societies explain almost twice as much variance as the data from
high-income societies alone.
Their theory also implies that one should find strong linkages between
self-expression values, the emergence of civil society, and the flourishing of
democratic institutions. As data from scores of countries demonstrate, societallevel
self-expression values are indeed closely correlated with a wide range of
such indicators, including the “global civil society index” and World Bank
indices of “government effectiveness,” “rule of law,” and “corruption control.”
They are also strongly correlated with the United Nations Development Programme’s
“gender empowerment measure” and an “index of effective democracy.”
Again, the gains obtained by increasing the range of variation more than
compensate for any loss of data quality.
Another important reason for covering the whole spectrum of economic and
democratic development is that bringing survey research into these societies
helps them develop their research capabilities. Survey research can provide
valuable feedback for policy makers, and the WVS network is based on the
belief that it is the responsibility of social scientists in developed societies
to help disseminate survey research techniques. Accordingly, the WVS has
produced many publications based on collaboration between social scientists
in developing countries and colleagues from countries with a long experience
in using survey research. Inglehart was convinced that, over time, the quality
of fieldwork in developing countries would be improved, and he considered the
effort to do so worth a substantial investment.
For academics, life regenerates itself through students and colleagues. Inglehart
takes tremendous pride in the students and colleagues with whom he has
worked – some of whom have contributed to this volume. This volume is a
tribute to Inglehart’s achievements as a modernization theorist and an analyst
of sociocultural change and also as a visionary who persistently worked to
develop a key data resource, the WVS. I express my deep gratitude to all the
authors for producing this volume. It is a testament both to Ronald Inglehart’s
scholarship and to the continuing importance of studying how changing values
are reshaping the societies and political systems in which we live.
1
Political Culture and Value Change
Russell J. Dalton and Christian Welzel
Approximately fifty years ago, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963) published
The Civic Culture, followed soon after by Sidney Verba and Lucian Pye’s
(1965) Political Culture and Political Development. The importance of these
two classic studies cannot be overemphasized. They widened the political culture
approach into a global framework for the comparative analysis of political
change and regime legitimacy in developed as well as developing countries. The
guiding question of the Almond-Verba-Pye approach concerned what citizen
beliefs make democratic regimes survive and flourish. With the expansion of
democracy into new regions of the globe, this civicness question is even more
relevant today.
Political Culture and Political Development laid out the analytical tool kit
and categories to examine the civicness question empirically. The volume was
particularly important on conceptual grounds, yet it lacked systematic crossnational
data to support its conclusions because such research was not feasible.
Today, this situation has changed dramatically. The World Values Survey
(WVS) and other cross-national projects have opened large parts of the developing
world to public opinion research. Now there is an abundance of evidence
on a wide range of social and political attitudes. This situation creates an
excellent opportunity to evaluate contemporary political cultures in terms of
the civicness question.
Verba and his colleagues stressed a cluster of orientations that supposedly
support a democratic polity: allegiance to the regime, pride in the political system,
and modest levels of political participation. This allegiant model was most
apparent in the United States and Britain, the two mature and stable democracies
in their study – and lacking in other democratizing nations. However,
the modern wave of comparative research in political culture offers a different
answer to the question of what citizen beliefs are congruent with democracy.
1
2 Political Culture and Value Change
Ronald Inglehart and his associates have stressed that the public’s values in
established democracies have been changing in fundamental ways that conflict
with the normative model of The Civic Culture (Inglehart 1977, 1990; Abramson
and Inglehart 1995; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). This research argued that
contemporary publics are developing more assertive, self-expressive values that
contrast with the allegiant values of the Civic Culture model, thus changing the
nature of democratic citizenship. Instead of an allegiant and loyal public, established
democracies now have a public of critical citizens (Klingemann 1999;
Norris 1999; Dalton 2004).1
In addition, the expansion of democracy during its third and fourth waves
speaks to a democratic potential that was often overlooked in the scholarly
community (Huntington 1984). People power movements from the Philippines
to communist Eastern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa demonstrate a
popular desire for political change that appears inconsistent with the Civic
Culture model. The Economist recognized this development when it described
why Egyptians protested for political reform against the various authoritarian
regimes they confronted, from the Mubarak regime to the generals controlling
the government in late 2013:
[The] worst mistake, however, is to ignore the chief lesson of the Arab Spring. This is
that ordinary people yearn for dignity. They hate being bossed around by petty officials
and ruled by corrupt autocrats. They reject the apparatus of a police state. Instead they
want better lives, decent jobs and some basic freedoms.2
These insights produce a far different image of the average person in a developing
nation than what was proposed in Political Culture and Political Development.
Individuals in these societies do not embrace or accept the authoritarian
states in which they live, but rather hold unfulfilled aspirations for a better way
of life.
Expanding empirical research on developing nations – both democratic and
nondemocratic – often finds that citizen values are a poor match to the patterns
presented in the early political culture and political development literature
(Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Dalton and Shin 2006; Bratton et al. 2004;
Moaddel 2007). Many of these publics are politically interested with strong
democratic aspirations. In short, some of the stark contrasts the civic culture
model posited between developing nations and established democracies seem
no longer valid. The Civic Culture maintained that allegiant orientations characterize
stable democracies and that these orientations need to mature in the
developing nations, too, if they ought to become stable democracies as well.
Today, however, assertive orientations characterize established democracies,
with some evidence that they are also emerging in the developing world.
1 There are, of course, debates on the processes producing value change and the nature of these
values. See, for example, Flanagan and Lee (2003), Schwarz (2006), and Abramson (2011).
2 “The Battle for Egypt,” The Economist, August 17, 2013, p. 11.
Political Culture and Value Change 3
This book is dedicated to a twofold task: analyzing cross-national survey
data in light of the initial Almond-Verba-Pye framework and reevaluating
the original civic culture model against more recent empirical evidence. To
accomplish this task, the contributors to this book use evidence from the WVS.
This is an unparalleled resource that allows us to analyze public opinions
toward government and democracy, citizen values, and the potential impact of
changing values on contemporary societies.
In the parlance of Hollywood filmmaking, we are not sure if this book
represents a remake of the early Civic Culture study or a sequel to it. However,
our intent is to use the basic concepts and ideas of Almond-Verba-Pye as our
starting point. Then we reevaluate this theory – and more recent developments
in political culture theory – based on the new evidence of the WVS. The results,
we believe, shed new light on how global values have been changing and the
implications for contemporary political systems.
the evolution of political culture research
A stable and effective democratic government . . . depends upon the orientations that
people have to the political process – upon the political culture. (Almond and Verba
1963, 498)
Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s (1963) classic The Civic Culture began the
systematic effort to identify the citizen beliefs that underlie viable and flourishing
democratic institutions. Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba’s (1965) Political
Culture and Political Development put this theme in an even broader crossnational
perspective, conceptualizing the role of citizen beliefs in the processes
of nation building and democratization.
Although the Civic Culture framework is well known, it is worthwhile to
summarize the key elements on which we build. Almond and Verba (1963,
15–17) characterized a nation’s political culture in terms of two dimensions.
First, they used a Parsonian approach to distinguish between different types
of attitudes: (1) cognitive orientations involve knowledge and beliefs about
politics; (2) affective orientations are positive or negative feelings toward political
objects; and (3) evaluative orientations involve judgments about political
options and processes. Second, they identified four different classes of political
objects toward which citizen attitudes are directed: (1) the political system in
general; (2) input objects, such as political parties, interest groups, or political
actors engaged in conveying demands from the citizenry to institutions; (3)
output objects, such as government bureaucracies or agents of state authority
that implement public policies; and (4) orientations toward the self and others
in terms of role models of what the ideal citizen should do.
Combining these two dimensions, Almond and Verba identified three ideal
types of political culture. The parochial culture exists when individuals are
essentially apolitical. People are unaware of the government and its policies
4 Political Culture and Value Change
and do not see themselves as involved in the political process. The subject
culture is one in which individuals are aware of the state and its policy outputs
but lack significant orientations toward input objects and toward the individual
as an active participant. The subject is aware of politics but only involved as a
recipient of orders and an object of mobilization.
In the participant culture, people hold orientations toward all four classes of
political objects. They are aware of government, the processes of political input,
and the outputs of government, and they adopt an activist view of their role
as citizens. People know and appreciate that they can express their preferences
through interest organizations and political parties, by casting votes for their
preferred candidates, or through other political activities.
Almond and Verba portrayed the civic culture that is most conducive to
democracy as a mixture of the subject and the participant orientations. In a civic
culture, citizens strictly abide the law and respect legitimate political authority.
Even as participant citizens, they are aware of their limited role in representative
democracies, which focuses on electing representatives within organizations or
public office holders. Direct involvement in policy formulations and policy
implementations is not part of the ordinary citizen’s standard repertoire, not
even the participant citizen.
Almond and Verba stressed that the parochial, subject, and participant cultures
are ideal-typical models, which do not exist in pure form in any society.
But they maintained that elements of the three models exist in significantly different
proportions in the world of their time. They postulated that elements of
the parochial culture were most widespread in the developing world; elements
of the subject culture in the communist world; and elements of the participant
culture in the “free world” of the West.
Other scholarship from this period reinforced this basic theoretical framework.
For example, Pye and Verba (1965) described the cultural impediments
to democracy in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Turkey in terms that evoked the concepts
of parochial and subject cultures – and a lack of a participant culture. Daniel
Lerner’s (1958) The Passing of Traditional Society described how socioeconomic
development and cognitive mobilization could change the political culture
of a nation, bringing a transition from parochial and subject orientations
to more participatory orientations. Banfield’s (1963) research on a rural Italian
village highlighted the conditions producing parochial and subject orientations.
Seymour Martin Lipset’s (1959, 1994) social prerequisite framework
considered less-developed nations as lacking the social conditions and public
sentiments that favor democracy. Accordingly, democracy required socioeconomic
modernization to transform a society and its culture in a democracycompatible
fashion (also see Almond and Coleman 1960; Inkeles 1969, 1983;
Inkeles and Smith 1974). This research posited a strong relationship between
socioeconomic development and the development of a democratic civic culture.
The political culture literature repeatedly emphasized a central assumption –
that a stable political system was more likely when the political culture was
Political Culture and Value Change 5
congruent with the structures of the political system (Almond and Verba 1963,
23–26; Eckstein 1966; Almond and Powell 1978, Chapter 2). For instance, a
parochial political culture should be predominant in traditional peasant societies
that have little contact with a national or regional government. A society
that is partly traditional and partly modern, typical of many developing nations,
presumably has a mixed parochial-subject culture. Most people in such systems
are presumably passive subjects, aware of government, complying with the law,
but not otherwise involved in public affairs. The parochials – poor and illiterate
urban dwellers, peasants, or farm laborers – have limited contact with
or awareness of the political system. Only a very small stratum of the public
participates in the political process, and even then in highly restricted ways.
At a further stage of social and political modernization, the congruent culture
and institutions reflect a different pattern. For instance, in industrialized
authoritarian societies, such as fascist states in Western Europe or the former
communist nations of Eastern Europe, most citizens are subjects. They are
encouraged and even forced to cast a symbolic vote of support in elections
and to pay taxes, obey regulations, demonstrate system identification in statemanaged
public events, and follow the dictates of government. Because of the
effectiveness of modern social organization, propaganda, and indoctrination,
few people are unaware of the government and its influence on their lives; there
are few parochials. At the same time, few people are involved as participants
who autonomously express their authentic preferences. It is even questionable
if authentic political preferences exist: Participants in the true sense are
absent not only because the system would repress them but also because the
citizens have not learned the role model of a participant citizen. There is a
strong assumption that modern authoritarian-totalitarian systems are successful
in using propaganda, indoctrination, and mass organization to infuse public
norms that support the system’s power structures.
The Civic Culture implied that a modern industrial democracy has a majority
of participants (in the limited, allegiant sense), a substantial number of subjects,
and a small group of parochials. This distribution presumably provided enough
political activists to ensure competition between political parties and sizable
voter turnout as well as attentive audiences for debate on public issues by
parties, candidates, and pressure groups.
There is an interesting tension in the Almond-Verba framework. On the
one hand, their framework is influenced by modernization theory and open
to the idea that socioeconomic modernization changes citizen preferences and
expectations. For example, they routinely examined educational differences in
political attitudes with the implicit argument that social modernization would
expand education and thus transform orientations in a pro-democratic direction.
The postulated direction of change was to strengthen many aspects of the
allegiant model of citizenship, such as various measures of political support.
On the other hand, comparative politics scholars largely overlooked the parallel
message that social modernization would also increase feelings of efficacy,
6 Political Culture and Value Change
autonomy, and political tolerance that might lead to new patterns of assertive
democratic participants.
In addition, the framework emphasized the indoctrination powers of modern
authoritarian systems and their ability to reproduce a culture that is congruent
with their authoritarian structures. This was likely a reflection of the
Cold War communist experience in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as
well as the tragic history of Europe in the mid-twentieth century (Almond
1998). The Civic Culture framework thus gave less attention to how socioeconomic
modernization can give rise to democratic, participatory desires even
in nondemocratic systems, accumulating an underground delegitimizing force
of authoritarian rule. Rightly or wrongly, many analysts concluded that participant
orientations and other democratic orientations can really take root
only under existing democratic systems (Rustow 1970; Muller and Seligson
1994; Jackman and Miller 1998; Hadenius and Teorell 2005). This implies a
primarily elite-driven model of democratization, if it occurs.
In summary, two broad implications for the democratization process follow
from this framework. First, the congruence thesis assumes that regime stability
and effective government are more likely if the political culture is congruent
with the regime form. Thus, one reason why autocratic governments exist is
presumably because they occur in societies where the citizenry tolerates or
even expects an autocratic state. Brutally rephrasing Adlai Stevenson, people
get the type of government that they deserve. Moreover, if we assume that the
political culture is embedded in a network of social relations, traditional norms,
and socioeconomic conditions, then cultural change will occur very slowly
(Eckstein 1966; Pye 2006). Thus, the congruence thesis implies that autocratic
governments endure when there is a parochial and subject culture. Progress
toward political modernization is likely to occur slowly and requires profound
changes in a nation’s political culture that may lag behind institutional change.3
Cultural-institutional congruence is an important condition for stable regimes.
Second, The Civic Culture had a constrained view of the values of the ideal
democratic citizen. The specter of hyperparticipation by antidemocratic groups
in interwar (and postwar) Europe led them to stress allegiance as a core virtue of
a stable democracy. Participant orientations are a good thing. However, a civic
culture requires that participant orientations be tempered by a strong dose of
subject orientations. In their words, “the civic culture is an allegiant participant
culture. Individuals are not only oriented to political inputs, they are oriented
positively to the input structures and the input process” (Almond and Verba
1963, 31; emphasis added).4
The ideal citizen thus respects political authority
3 Almond and Verba do not say that cultures cannot change or be changed. In fact, the focus on
Germany in their study was implicitly to identify how the culture should be changed to produce
public values more supportive of postwar German democracy.
4 Almond and Verba (1963, 31) continue to state that “in the civic culture participant political
orientations combine with and do not replace subject and political orientations. Individuals
Political Culture and Value Change 7
and accepts the decisions of government; this citizen is a follower rather than
a challenger. She supports democracy, is satisfied with the democratic process,
has confidence in institutions, and becomes engaged only where institutional
mechanisms channel her activities toward orderly outcomes. There is limited
room for political dissatisfaction, questioning authority, civil disobedience, or
elite-challenging activity in The Civic Culture.
a counterview
An initial challenge to the importance of an allegiant citizenry for a flourishing
of democracy came from the Political Action study (Barnes and Kaase et al.
1979). In reaction to the student protests of the late 1960s, this study examined
the expanding use of elite-challenging political action, such as protests, boycotts,
wildcat strikes, blockades, occupying buildings, and other contentious
actions. The project asked whether the extension of the citizens’ repertoire to
elite-challenging actions undermined representative democracy, as some critics
suspected (Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975). The Political Action
study did not support this suspicion; protesters did not abstain from conventional
forms of political participation, and they showed a strong attachment to
democratic norms. For sure, protesters were disillusioned about some aspects
of the democratic process. However, they did not reject democracy; they were
committed to the democratic ideas of citizen participation, freedom of expression,
and the elites’ obligation to be responsive to public demands. The 1960–
70s protesters seemed to anticipate a new model of an assertive democratic
citizen that contrasts with the allegiant model of The Civic Culture. Ever since,
political culture research has seen a latent tension between an allegiant and an
assertive model of democratic citizenship.
Recognizing these developments, Almond and Verba (1980) began to
explore the dynamics of cultural change in The Civic Culture Revisited. They
found that the best examples of the civic culture, the United States and Great
Britain, had experienced a decline in allegiant, trustful orientations and a rise
in challenging political values that was unexpected in the earlier Civic Culture
volume. Almond (1998, 5–6) wrote retrospectively, “What we learned from
the Civic Culture Revisited was that political culture is a plastic many dimensioned
variable, and that it responds quickly to structural change. It was not
that Verba and I failed to appreciate structural variables . . . But we surely did
not appreciate how quickly, and how steep the curves of change were going
to be.” Thus the research agenda changed from explaining the persistence of
become participants in the political process, but they do not give up their orientation as subjects
or parochials . . . The maintenance of these more traditional attitudes and their fusion with
the participation orientation lead to a balanced political culture in which political activity,
involvement and rationality exist but are balanced by passivity, traditionality, and commitment
to parochial values.”
8 Political Culture and Value Change
political cultures to predicting how they could change, and the consequences
of change.
Ronald Inglehart’s The Silent Revolution (1977) provided a theoretical
groundwork for this assertive model of democratic citizenship. Inglehart linked
the spread of elite-challenging action to the rise of postmaterialist values, which
emphasize self-expression and direct participation in politics. Inspired by modernization
theory, he explained the emergence of postmaterialist values as the
consequence of the rising existential security and cognitive mobilization that
characterized the postwar generations in Western democracies. He held that
social modernization would also give rise to postmaterialist values in nondemocratic
regimes – which is potentially a powerful delegitimizing force against
authoritarianism (Inglehart 1990).
The new type of self-expressive, postmaterialist political protester raised
the suspicion of scholars who believed that the functioning of representative
democracy requires the dominance of an allegiant citizen model (Crozier et al.
1975). Robert Putnam’s (1993) influential study of political culture in Italy
also accepted the allegiant model of citizenship – at least implicitly. This is
apparent in the way he defined social capital, namely, as “trust, norms, and
networks that facilitate cooperation and civic action” (167). Social capital
was not only operationalized as trust in fellow citizens but also as trust in
institutions, including the institutions of government – which is a key allegiant
orientation.
Indeed, further research showed that the processes linked to rising elitechallenging
politics and postmaterialist values strained the principle of representative
democracy. For one, political and partisan competition added a
cultural cleavage focused on lifestyle issues to the long-standing economic cleavage
centered on material redistribution. This gave rise to New Left parties that
mobilize on environmental and other “New Politics” issues and New Right
parties that mobilize on immigration and traditional values (Kitschelt 1989;
Norris 2005). Furthermore, electoral participation, party identification, confidence
in political institutions, and satisfaction with the democratic process
were declining in most postindustrial democracies, while support for democracy
as a political system and attachment to basic democratic norms remained
stable or increased (Dalton 2004; Norris 2011).
The Civic Culture study and much of the early public opinion research
typically focused on established Western democracies. The practical reason
was that representative mass surveys could not be conducted in the communist
world and large parts of the developing world. This situation changed dramatically
when consecutive waves of democratization opened the former communist
bloc and large parts of the developing world to survey research. This initiated an
unprecedented expansion of cross-national survey programs in addition to the
WVS: the International Social Survey Program; the Comparative Study of Electoral
Systems; and the democracy barometers in Eastern Europe, Latin America,
Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Much of the work in these programs was
Political Culture and Value Change 9
inspired by the initial question of the Civic Culture study: What types of citizen
beliefs are most beneficial to help new democracies survive and flourish and
what makes and keeps citizens supportive of the idea of democracy?
These surveys fielded questions on people’s regime preferences and their
levels of support for democracy, both in its concrete form and as an abstract
ideal. The first reports calculated the percentages of democracy supporters in
a country or compared the balance of support for democracy against support
for alternative regimes (Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer 1998; Klingemann 1999;
Mishler and Rose 2001; Klingemann, Fuchs, and Zielonka 2006). This research
yielded the surprising – and consistent – finding that support for democracy as
a principle was widespread across established democracies, new democracies,
and nondemocracies. In sharp contrast to Almond and Verba, the public in
contemporary authoritarian states does not seem to embrace rule by autocrats –
at least not when one takes people’s overt regime preferences at face value.
Scholars also started to differentiate different types of democratic support,
such as intrinsic and instrumental support (Bratton and Mattes 2001; Inglehart
and Welzel 2005), idealist and realist support (Shin and Wells 2005), or support
that is coupled with dissatisfaction with the way democracy works: dissatisfied
democrats or critical citizens (Klingemann 1999; Norris 1999). These classifications
qualify democratic regime support for the motives and beliefs that lie
behind it (Schedler and Sarsfield 2006). Accordingly, they focus attention on
the emergence of a new type of nonallegiant democrat and the implications for
the development of democracy.
More recently, researchers have tried to disentangle what people in different
parts of the world understand about the term democracy (Dalton, Shin, and
Jou 2007; Mattes and Bratton 2007; Diamond 2008; Chapter 4). Surprisingly
as it may seem from the viewpoint of cultural relativism, there is a core liberal
understanding of democracy among ordinary people around the world. What
first comes to most people’s minds when they think about democracy is the
freedom to govern their lives that liberal democracy grants them. Pronounced
cultural differences exist, however, in the extent to which the liberal notion
of democracy trumps alternative notions of democracy (Welzel 2013, 307–
32). Yet, despite these differences in relative importance, freedom seems to
have appeal across cultures. Resonating with this broad appeal, freedom is
the central theme in Amartya Sen’s (1999) interpretation of modernization as
“human development.” He defines development normatively as the growth of
freedom. Clearly this definition of development includes liberal democracy.
Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel (2005) further elaborate the idea of
human development and integrate it into the political culture field (also Welzel,
Inglehart, and Klingemann 2003). In Freedom Rising, Welzel (2013) expands
this approach to describe the growth of emancipative values among contemporary
publics. He equates development with the empowerment of people to
exert their freedoms. His theory describes liberal democracy as the “legal component”
of empowerment. Its significance from an empowerment perspective
10 Political Culture and Value Change
is that it grants people the rights that enable them to practice freedoms (both
personal and political). However, in the sequence of empowerment, democracy
is the third component. For democracy only becomes effective after ordinary
people have acquired the resources that make them capable to practice freedoms
and after they have internalized the values that make them willing to
practice freedoms. In this view, participatory resources and values proliferate
the material and motivational components of people power. They must be in
place before democracy can be effectively practiced. Welzel identifies a set of
orientations that are emancipative in their impetus because they merge libertarian
and egalitarian orientations. The prevalence of these emancipative values
in a society is more closely linked with levels of democracy than any other
citizen belief. The most important component of emancipative values in this
respect has been found to be liberty aspirations – quite in line with the emphasis
that liberal democracy places on freedom (Welzel 2007). In short, the human
development model by Inglehart and Welzel and Welzel’s emancipatory theory
argue for recognition of an assertive model of democratic citizenship.5
The revisionist strand of research champions an assertive model of political
culture that also can be congruent with democracy, albeit with different political
implications. Some of the key contrasts between allegiant and assertive
cultures are summarized in Table 1.1. Changing orientations produce a general
increase in postmaterialist and emancipative values as well as a shift in
basic authority beliefs. These cultural changes manifest themselves in shifting
attitudes toward political institutions, the practice of democracy, and even
the definition of a good democracy and a good citizen. These political norms
carry over to specific policy views that we also examine in this volume. For
example, the traditional model of citizen included a strong priority for economic
prosperity and little concern for environmental protection. The new
pattern of assertive citizenship heightens environmental concerns. Traditional
norms gave limited attention on issues of racial and ethnic equality and sexual
liberation; these issues receive strong support under the assertive model of
citizenship.
In summary, the debates over the role of political culture owe their inspiration
to the initial groundwork laid by Almond and Verba in The Civic Culture
and by Verba and Pye in Political Culture and Political Development. Their
research focused on an allegiant model of citizenship as essential to stable
democracy, whereas the contours of an assertive model of citizenship became
clear only recently. The content of a democratic political culture can be more
complex than Almond and Verba and Pye initially envisioned, and the spread
of democratic orientations differs markedly from earlier expectations of average
citizens. The results, we believe, lead to both a reevaluation of the political
5 This same theoretical logic is represented in research on dissatisfied democrats by Klingemann
(1999), critical citizens by Norris (1999), and even more clearly the model of engaged citizenship
by Dalton (2009).
Political Culture and Value Change 11
table 1.1. Aspects of Allegiant and Assertive Citizenship
Domain Allegiant Citizens Assertive Citizens
Value priorities Output priorities with an
emphasis on order and
security limit input priorities
that might emphasize voice
and participation;
materialist/protective values
predominate
Input priorities with an emphasis
on voice and participation grow
stronger at the expense of output
priorities with an emphasis
on order and security:
postmaterialist/emancipative
values prevail over materialist/
protective values
Authority
orientations
Deference to authority in the
family, at the workplace, and
in politics
Distance to authority in the
family, at the workplace, and in
politics
Institutional
trust
High trust in institutions Low trust in institutions
Democratic
support
Support for both the principles
of democracy and its practice
(satisfied democrats)
Strong support for the principles
of democracy but weak support
for its practice (dissatisfied
democrats)
Democracy
notion
Input-oriented notions of
democracy as a means of voice
and participation mix with
output-oriented notions of
democracy as a tool of
delivering social goods
Input-oriented notions of
democracy as a means of voice
and participation become clearly
dominant
Political
activism
Voting and other conventional
forms of legitimacy-granting
activity
Strong affinity to nonviolent,
elite-challenging activity
Expected
systemic
consequences
More effective and accountable governance?
Note: For an operationalization of allegiant and assertive citizens, see Table 12.1 (p. 293).
culture approach and a new sense of the potential for democracy to advance in
the world today.
studying values around the globe
The WVS emerged from the European Values Study (EVS), which in turn has its
roots in the Eurobarometer surveys. In contrast to the Eurobarometer and other
regional barometers, the WVS/EVS surveys are interested in deep-seated preferences,
expectations, and beliefs of the people, not in short-term public opinion
topics. The guiding perspective of the value surveys is threefold. One objective
is to identify patterns of values that are useful for cross-cultural comparison
12 Political Culture and Value Change
table 1.2. The Five Waves of the World Values Survey
Regions
Wave 1,
1981–84
Wave 2,
1989–93
Wave 3,
1994–99
Wave 4,
1999–2004
Wave 5,
2005–8
Western democracies 16 18 10 20 15
East Europe/
Post-USSR
1 11 23 21 17
East/South Asia 2 3 6 8 10
Middle East/North
Africa
– 1 1 9 6
Sub-Saharan Africa – 2 2 5 7
Latin America 2 4 10 4 9
Total number of
nations
21 39 52 67 62
Total number of
respondents
26,511 62,771 77,114 100,052 81,474
and that group societies into distinctive culture zones. Another objective is to
determine whether these cultural patterns relate to the institutional forms and
the socioeconomic conditions of a society: Is there systematic evidence for a
psychological dimension of development and democracy? Another objective
focuses on cultural change: Is there evidence for a transformation in human
values, and are these changes operating in the same direction under the imprint
of similar socioeconomic transformations?
Inspired by these objectives, the WVS/EVS surveys followed three priorities:
(1) only ask questions about things that are fundamental to the lives of people
in every society, whether rich or poor, democratic or autocratic, Western or
non-Western; (2) repeat the surveys every five to ten years to build a time
series that allows one to trace change in values; and (3) expand the scope of
comparison so that it spans all culture zones of the globe to test general theories
of mass behavior. The latter point reflects a unique feature of the WVS.
The EVS started with a first round in 1981–83 and included more than a
dozen European countries. Additional efforts that then established the WVS
added Japan, South Korea, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, the US and Canada.
Interestingly, the first round also included two communist samples: a national
Hungarian sample and a sample from the Russian oblast “Tambov.”
The second round of the WVS was conducted from 1989 to 1991 in some
forty societies (see Table 1.2). This round expanded especially into the transforming
ex-communist world. In many countries, like the former German
Democratic Republic, the survey was done before the political transition was
finalized, providing a valuable snapshot of public mood during the transition
period. This round of the WVS also expanded to China, India, Chile, Brazil,
Nigeria, South Africa, and Turkey.
The third round of the WVS spanned from 1995 to 1997. It included
some fifty societies. Thanks to efforts by Hans-Dieter Klingemann, the project
Political Culture and Value Change 13
had extensive coverage of postcommunist countries in this round. In addition,
Columbia, El Salvador, Venezuela, Uruguay, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and
Taiwan were surveyed for the first time.
The fourth round, from 1999 to 2001, covered almost sixty societies. The
project placed particular emphasis on covering Islamic societies: Algeria, Egypt,
Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia were surveyed for the first time.
The WVS also extended the list of surveyed countries in sub-Saharan Africa:
Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In Asia, the WVS included Indonesia, the
Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam for the first time.
The fifth and most recent round of the WVS was conducted between
2005 and 2008 in some fifty societies. The survey was extended into francophone
sub-Saharan Africa, covering Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Mali, as
well as into Ethiopia and Rwanda. In Asia, the WVS included Hong Kong,
Malaysia, and Thailand for the first time. The fifth round also revised a considerable
portion of the questionnaire: new questions developed by Christian
Welzel to measure in-group and out-group trust, meanings of democracy, social
identity, citizenship ideals, and media usage were added.6
In terms of spatial and temporal scope, the WVS is a unique data source.
The survey has included more than ninety societies that represent more than
90 percent of the world population. Counting repeated surveys in the same
nations, about 250 country-by-year units are available. About sixty societies
have been surveyed at least twice; for about forty-five societies, the WVS provides
longitudinal evidence of at least ten years. For another dozen societies,
the time series covers the entire period from 1981 to 2006, spanning fully
twenty-five years.
The WVS covers topics that are of inherent interest from the civic culture
perspective: regime preferences, support for democracy, trust in institutions,
social trust, law abidingness, political interest, media usage, voluntary activity,
protest participation, authority orientations, liberty aspirations, social tolerance
and so on. It is the only international survey that has such basic measures
of human values across countries spanning all the regions of the globe.
With this thematic breadth and its spatial and temporal scope, the WVS
is clearly the ideal data source to examine the various facets of the civicness
question outlined earlier. Hence, the chapters in this book are unified by both
their interest in the civicness question and their usage of WVS data as a common
source.7
In that sense, this book is a tribute to the WVS and its founding father,
Ronald Inglehart.
6 At the time of this writing, the World Values Survey was about to finish its sixth wave of surveys
in more than sixty societies around the globe. The initial release of the sixth wave data was in
April 2014: www.worldvaluessurvey.org.
7 Unless indicated otherwise, the analyses throughout the chapters of this book use WVS data in
unweighted form. The experience shows that weighted results usually do not differ significantly.
Because the calibration weights provided with past official data releases are not documented
equally well for all countries, it seems preferable not to use these weights in the type of largescale
cross-national analyses that the chapters of this volume perform.
14 Political Culture and Value Change
plan of the book
As the WVS has expanded over time, a large number of international scholars
have become part of this research project. We have assembled a distinguished
subset of these scholars to examine the topics of political culture, global value
change, and democratic politics.
The book is organized into three thematic sections. The first section concentrates
on the broad process of value change that fuels the transition from allegiant
to assertive citizenship. Postmaterialist value change in Western democracies
was the foundation for challenging the allegiant model of The Civic Culture
and led to the broad theory of emancipatory cultural change. Thus, Paul R.
Abramson first examines the postmaterialist trend in Western democracies.
He tracks the evolution of postmaterialist values across generations spanning
forty years of surveys. He also shows how the generational patterns persist
across the life cycle of consecutive birth cohorts. The results demonstrate that
generational turnover has been a driving force in postmaterialist value change.
Neil Nevitte uses the multiple waves of the WVS to track the decline of
deferential orientations in various social domains. The traditional political
culture model implies that deference to legitimate authority is a key element of
an allegiant culture (Almond and Verba 1963, Chapters 9–12; Eckstein 1966).
Thus, the erosion of deference is part of the transition toward a more assertive
and elite-challenging citizenry.
Christian Welzel and Alejandro Moreno Alvarez analyze a new set of questions
on people’s views of democracy. They find that rising emancipative values
change the nature of people’s desire for democracy in a twofold way: Emancipative
values increase (1) the liberalness of people’s notion of democracy
and (2) the criticalness of their assessment of democracy. Emancipative values
make people’s democratic desires more liberal and critical in all culture
zones and across different social traits and political regimes, which the authors
characterize as an “enlightenment” effect.
The second section of this volume identifies some key features that describe
the rise of an assertive citizenship. Russell J. Dalton and Doh Chull Shin document
the limited applicability of the allegiant model to citizens in established
democracies and in developing nations. Support for a democratic regime is
widespread across the globe, yet public skepticism of political institutions is
also widespread. It is especially striking in many established democracies that
were once the bastion of allegiant citizens but now have politically skeptical
publics. The authors offer evidence that contemporary democratization stimulates
a more critical citizenry.
Hans-Dieter Klingemann then focuses on the new category of dissatisfied
democrats in European societies, describing their increase as a consequence of
the changing values of contemporary publics. He reflects on the implications of
these new assertive citizens for our traditional models of a democratic political
culture.
Political Culture and Value Change 15
Finally, Christian W. Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova describe patterns and
change in political support in postcommunist Europe and post-Soviet Eurasia.
They find a stronger presence of allegiant orientations in the countries with
the largest deficiencies in democracy. By contrast, the countries with the least
democratic deficits show a stronger presence of assertive orientations – in line
with the theme of this book.
The third section of this book asks how changing values of contemporary
publics are affecting more specific political attitudes and behaviors. Robert
Rohrschneider, Matt Miles, and Mark Peffley study the relationship between
social modernization, values, and environmental attitudes. They find that postmaterialist
values in developed societies connect current environmental attitudes
in these nations to a broader criticism of modes of economic production.
The result is a more politicized environmental movement, even when environmental
conditions are improving.
Tor Georg Jakobsen and Ola Listhaug analyze the evolution of protest activity
from 1981 to 2007. They find that citizens’ use of elite-challenging behavior
increases with economic development and is especially common among younger
generations and postmaterialist citizens.
Pippa Norris studies differences in gender attitudes between Muslim and
non-Muslim states. In contrast to those who argue that oil resources entrench
the patriarchy of traditional societies, she argues that cultural values leave a
deep imprint on the way people see the most appropriate roles for men and
women in society – including the contemporary role of women in elected office.
Finally, Bi Puranen examines people’s willingness to fight for their country
in the case of war, which is a key element of allegiant orientations.8
She finds
that confidence in the armed forces and authoritarian regime preferences –
which are in decline in many places – explain people’s willingness to fight. This
finding suggests that willingness to fight is in decline as well, indicating the
erosion of allegiance in one of its core domains.
The conclusion by Welzel and Dalton evaluates the Civic Culture’s theoretical
framework in light of the findings presented in this book. The previous
chapters document the transition from an allegiant to an assertive type
of democratic citizen. The conclusion then extends these micro-level analyses
to examine the impact of political culture at the aggregate cross-national
level. This analysis puts the central assumption of a culture-governance congruence
to a direct test. Specifically, the chapter examines the relationship
between allegiant and assertive values with governmental capacity and democratic
accountability. It finds that allegiant values do not associate with either
capacity or accountability, whereas assertive values display strong positive
relationships with both. These results suggest that a new style of democratic
8 We, together with Bi Puranen, wish to acknowledge Juan D´ıez-Nicol ´as and to thank him for his
very valuable contribution to earlier versions of this chapter.
16 Political Culture and Value Change
politics is expanding, which should produce a more participatory and more
citizen-centered democratic process.
the CIVIC CULTURE’s legacy
Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture is a major landmark in the study
of citizens’ relationship with their government. In trying to look back at the
failures of democracy in the past, it proscribed a model of citizen values that
fit that history. Our book’s basic argument is that history has changed and,
with it, the values of citizens in contemporary democracies – shaping a new
relationship between citizens and their government. The reader will see the
evidence in the pages that follow.
At the same time, the legacy of The Civic Culture is enduring. As Sidney
Verba (2011) has recently written, the lasting impact of the Almond and Verba
study is to create a fruitful field of political culture research in which others
contribute and continue to expand the research crop. As Verba states, “The
Civic Culture was fruitful. Its substantive and technical approach was such that
it could be improved on, and it has been” (Verba 2011, iv). Thus, we see this
book as contributing to the bounty that The Civic Culture first sowed more
than five decades ago.