Christian Welzel

Leuphana University Lüneburg ·  Center for the Study of Democracy

This article introduces the data from the Values in Crisis project conducted in Germany and the United Kingdom. The project seized the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to investigate whether, how and to what extent people’s moral values change as a result of a disruptive event of massive order and global scale. An online panel survey measu...

A growing number of studies test key cultural constructs used in comparative political research for invariance across countries, only to declare these constructs incomparable if the invariance tests fail. The assumption underlying this kind of conclusion is that between-country differences in within-country factor solutions reflect cross-cultural i...

This study provides new evidence on how historical patterns of household formation shape the present-day level of trust. We test two distinct features of historical family arrangements that might be harmful to trust towards out-groups: (a) family extendedness in terms of the number of household members, and (b) generational hierarchy and gender rel...

Cross-cultural research in social and behavioral sciences has expanded hugely over the past 50 years, but progress is currently hampered by a lack of appreciation of the profoundly differing principles and goals of two distinct traditions. The first is the main variant of cross-cultural psychology (CCP), focusing on how culture shapes individual ps...

A cornerstone of well-being research is that the resource-rich are happier with their lives than the resource-poor and better positioned to cope with stressful life events. This paper addresses the role of various resources—human, economic, social, and psychological capital—in life satisfaction during the coronavirus pandemic, using panel data from...

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Introduction The global coronavirus pandemic offers a quasi-experimental setting for understanding the impact of sudden exposure to heightened existential risk upon both individual and societal values. Methods We examined the effect of the pandemic on political attitudes by comparing data from eight countries surveyed before and after the worldwid...

This chapter examines the role that the concept of political culture plays in comparative politics. In particular, it considers how the political culture field increases our understanding of the social roots of democracy and how these roots are transforming through cultural change. In analysing the inspirational forces of democracy, key proposition...

The Cool Water condition is a climatic configuration that combines periodically frosty winters with mildly warm summers under the ubiquitous accessibility of fresh water. Historically, it embodied opportunity endowments that weakened fertility pressures, resulting in household formation patterns that empowered women and reduced gender inequality. R...

Our original 2021 SMR article “Non-Invariance? An Overstated Problem with Misconceived Causes” disputes the conclusiveness of non-invariance diagnostics in diverse cross-cultural settings. Our critique targets the increasingly fashionable use of Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA), especially in its mainstream version. We document—both...

The literature considers nonviolent protests among the most important predictors of transitions towards democracy and democratic reforms. This study addresses the conditionsmaking countries more likely to experience nonviolent instead of violent forms of protest. While the literature emphasizes economic and political predictors of protest at the co...

Trust is widely considered a critical resource for modern societies, and in times of crisis like the coronavirus pandemic, its importance is even greater: More than ever we depend on fellow citizens to behave responsibly, and on institutional actors to make the right decisions. Looking at trust from an existential security point of view, this paper...

Nations have been questioned as meaningful units for analyzing culture due to their allegedly limited variance-capturing power and large internal heterogeneity. Against this skepticism, we argue that culture is by definition a collective phenomenon and focusing on individual differences contradicts the very concept of culture. Through the “miracle...

Nations have been questioned as meaningful units for analyzing culture due to their limited variance-capturing power and large internal heterogeneity. Against this skepticism, we argue that culture is by definition a collective phenomenon and focusing on individual differences contradicts the very concept of culture. Through the “miracle of aggrega...

The series of recent crises (EURO, refugees, backsliding, Brexit) challenge the self-portrayal of the European Union (EU) as a community of shared values. Against this backdrop, we analyse European Values Study data from 1990 till 2020 to assess the level and change in publics’ acceptance of the EU’s officially propagated values: personal freedom,...

The nation-building literature of the early 1960s argued that decolonized countries need to overcome pre-colonial ethnic identities and generate national cultures. Africa is the most critical test case of this aspect of modernization theory as it has by far the largest ethnolinguistic fractionalization. We use data from the Afrobarometer to compare...

Recent accounts of democratic backsliding are negligent about the cultural foundations of autocracy-vs-democracy. To bring culture back in, I demonstrate that (1) the countries’ membership in culture zones explains some 70% of the global variation in autocracy-vs-democracy and (2) that this culture-bound variation has remained astoundingly constant...

This study investigates the interactive effect of female entrepreneurs’ experience of work–life imbalance and gender-egalitarian macro-level conditions on their job satisfaction, with the prediction that the negative linear relationship between work–life imbalance and job satisfaction may be buffered by the presence of women-friendly action resourc...

Scholars study representative international surveys to understand cross-cultural differences in mentality patterns, which are measured via complex multi-item constructs. Methodologists in this field insist with increasing vigor that detecting “non-invariance” in how a construct’s items associate with each other in different national samples is an i...

Numerous studies have reported a positive individual-level association between happiness and two psychologically distinct states of mind: religious faith and subjective freedom (a feeling of life control). Although the strength of these relationships varies across countries, no general pattern driving this variation has been shown so far. After sur...

Soon after the collapse of Soviet-type communism in Central and Eastern Europe, a new geopolitical division began to reshape the continent. Our study demonstrates that this newly emerging geopolitical divide has been underpinned by a corresponding cultural divergence, of which "emancipative values" are the most powerful marker. Using the European V...

This chapter examines the role that the concept of political culture plays in comparative politics. In particular, it considers how the political culture field increases our understanding of the social roots of democracy and how these roots are transforming through cultural change. In analysing the inspirational forces of democracy, key proposition...

In the Print published article, the funding source was missed in the acknowledgements section. The correct acknowledgement is given below:

There is a longstanding debate about whether culture shapes regimes or regimes shape culture. New research by Ruck et al. resolves the debate in favor of culture’s causal primacy.

This study introduces a human empowerment framework to better understand why some businesses are more socially oriented than others in their policies and activities. Building on Welzel’s theory of emancipation, we argue that human empowerment—comprised of four components: action resources, emancipative values, social movement activity, and civic en...

Soon after the collapse of Soviet-type communism in Central and Eastern Europe, a new geopolitical division began to reshape Europe. For the first time, our study demonstrates how strongly this new geopolitical division has been propped up by an emerging cultural gap, of which "emancipative values" are the most powerful marker. Using the European V...

An intriguing phenomenon consists in the fact that widespread support for democracy coexists in many countries with the persistent absence of democracy itself. Addressing this phenomenon, we show that in most places where it exists people understand democracy in ambiguous ways, such that “authoritarian” notions of what democracy means mix with—and...

This study investigates the effect of country-level emancipative forces on corporate gender diversity around the world. Based on Welzel’s (Freedom rising: human empowerment and the quest for emancipation. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013) theory of emancipation, we develop an emancipatory framework of board gender diversity that explains...

Using a new measure of “comprehensive democracy,” our analysis traces the global democratic trend over the last 116 years, from 1900 until 2016, looking in particular at the centennial trend’s cultural zoning. As it turns out, democracy has been proceeding and continues to differentiate the world’s nations in a strongly culture-bound manner: high l...

A widely neglected phenomenon consists in the fact that large population segments in many countries confuse the absence of democracy with its presence. Significantly, these are also the countries where widespread support for democracy coexists with persistent deficiencies in the latter, including its outright absence. Addressing this puzzle, we int...

This chapter examines the role of mass beliefs and value change in democratization processes. Building on one of the central assumptions of political culture theory—the congruence thesis—it argues that mass beliefs are of critical importance for a country’s chances to become and remain democratic. Mass beliefs determine whether a political system i...

Democratization introduces the theoretical and practical dimensions of democratization. Focusing on the ‘global wave of democratization’ that has advanced since the early 1970s, this text examines the major perspectives, approaches, and insights that have informed research on democratization. The book is divided into four parts based on four aspect...

This chapter summarizes the main insights from the book and sets out the main challenges lying ahead for democracy. It identifies varieties of autocracy and the role of external threats and group hostilities before assessing the possibilities of spreading democracy to new regions, consolidating and improving new democracies, and deepening old democ...

This essay argues that high‐quality democracy cannot persist in the absence of emancipative values, as much as autocracy cannot persist in their presence. Support for democracy, by contrast, is an altogether misleading indicator of a public's affinity to democracy because what support for democracy means depends entirely on emancipative values: In...

This study provides new evidence on the impact of historic household formation patterns on present day levels of social capital (SC). We distinguish effects on bonding and bridging social capital, of which only the latter is beneficial for a society as a whole. Our results challenge the view that large household size in the past per se was responsi...

For three decades, scholars have focused on generalized interpersonal trust as the key component of social capital and there is a wide consensus that trust in strangers is the prime indicator of people’s general trust in others. However, little work with a specific focus on trust in strangers has been conducted in a comparative multilevel framework...

Supplemenatry_Table – Supplemental material for Got Milk? How Freedoms Evolved From Dairying Climates

The roots and routes of cultural evolution are still a mystery. Here, we aim to lift a corner of that veil by illuminating the deep origins of encultured freedoms, which evolved through centuries-long processes of learning to pursue and transmit values and practices oriented toward autonomous individual choice. Analyzing a multitude of data sources...

Over several thousand years since the emergence of states, societies remained entrapped in cycles of despotic power building and decay—until civilization matured in areas with a cool and rainy climate, what we call the “cool water” (CW) condition. In CW-areas, agriculture and urbanization at a level known since millennia from the pristine civilizat...

Since decades, cross-cultural psychology examines moral values using data from standardized surveys, assuming that values guide human behavior. We add to this literature by studying the link between moral values and various forms of prosocial behavior, using data from respondents of the sixth World Values Survey in Germany who participated in an on...

Using World Values Survey data from several dozen countries around the world, this article analyzes the relationship between postmaterialist values and bribery (dis)approval in a multilevel framework. We find that people, who place stronger emphasis on postmaterialist values, tend to justify bribery more. However, the “ecological” effect of postmat...

Pitfalls in the Study of Democratization: Testing the Emancipatory Theory of Democracy - Volume 47 Issue 2 - Christian Welzel, Ronald Inglehart, Stefan Kruse

PPT explains why Trump won and Clinton lost the 2016 presidential US-election

In their classic, The Civic Culture, Almond and Verba (1963) define the ideal democratic citizen as an allegiant, trustful, and modestly participatory person. This ideal has shaped how scholars think about consolidated democracies as well the process of democratic development. In contrast, we argue that a new model of assertive citizenship spreads...

This article presents evidence for a rising emancipatory spirit, across generations and around the world, in a life domain in which religion hitherto blocked emancipatory gains: sexual freedoms. We propose an explanation of rising emancipative values that integrates several approaches into a single idea—the utility ladder of freedoms. Specifically,...

Over the past couple of years, our knowledge about diffusion processes has increased greatly. So far, the focus has been on public policies, political institutions, and civil society repertories. Our paper breaks new ground by exploring value diffusion at the societal level. Using the World Values Survey data, we are interested in the diffusion of...

A puzzling paradox consists in the fact that widespread support for democracy coexists frequently with the very absence of the latter. Addressing this puzzle, we show that wherever it exists, most people misunderstand democracy in authoritarian ways that defy its emancipatory core. Such authoritarian notions of democracy (henceforth: ANDs) lend leg...

This presentation demonstrates that inter-state peace is underpinned by an increasingly solid mass basis: representative survey data from around the world evidence a massive decline in people’s willingness to sacrifice their lives in war. To explain this finding, I test and confirm Welzel’s Evolutionary Emancipation Theory (EET). When improving exi...

Structural equation modelers judge multi-item constructs against three requirements: (a) multiple items converge in a single dimension; (b) individual-level patterns of item convergence are invariant across countries; (c) aggregate-level patterns of item convergence replicate those at the individual level. This approach involves two premises: Measu...

Trust in people is general insofar as it extends to out-groups, that is, unfamiliar and dissimilar others. But whether trust in out-groups can emerge independently from in-group trust is controversial, and conclusive evidence has been unavailable. This article fills this gap, analyzing which conditions create out-group trust independent from in-gro...

The Democratic Peace thesis implies that the absence of war between major powers since 1945 reflects the spread of democracy. The Capitalist/Liberal Peace theses emphasize economic development, international trade and the knowledge society, which shift the basis of wealth and power from land and coercion, to technological innovation and creativity,...

Inglehart and Welzel (2005) argue that modernization moves in two phases. The transi-tion from agrarian to industrial society fosters a shift from ‘traditional to secular-rational values’, the transition from industrial to postindustrial society a shift from ‘survival to self-expression values’. We test for the first time the measurement model and...

Still today, The Civic Culture by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba counts as one of the most influential studies in comparative politics. The opus was pathbreaking because it formalized a model to describe the political culture of a nation and applied this model cross-nationally in five countries. As Sidney Verba (2011) has recently suggested, The C...

Based on evidence from fifty societies around the world, this chapter examines the impact of value orientations on three distinct aspects of how people view democracy: the strength of their desires for democracy, the liberalness of their notions of democracy, and the criticalness of their assessments of democracy. We focus on the ways in which "ema...

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...

This book re-evaluates Almond, Verba, and Pye's original ideas about the shape of a civic culture that supports democracy. Marshaling a massive amount of cross-national, longitudinal public opinion data from the World Values Survey Association, the authors demonstrate multiple manifestations of a deep shift in the mass attitudes and behaviors that...

The slides show some of the Figures and Tables from the article and some additional ones.

This appendix documents all measurement procedures, index construction and shows descriptive statistics as well as supplementary analyses to the article. At the end there is review repsonse section, with responses to points raised during the review process.

This online appendix documents all measurement procedures, index constructions and analytical steps taken in Freedom Rising. There are also command syntaxes, descriptive statistics, supplementary analyses and links to replication data.

This slide show includes all Figures and Tables published in Welzel's CUP monograph Freedom Rising.

Slide show documents a replication of the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map with Welzel's refined measures of Protective vs. Emancipative Values (previously Survival vs. Self-Expression Values) and Sacred vs. Secular Values (previously Traditional vs. Secular-Rational Values). Maps are shown in black and white as well as in color. Because the number of...

This article presents a new theory of development that unifies disparate insights into a single framework, focusing on human empowerment—a process that emancipates people from domination. Historically, human empowerment on a mass scale started only recently because civilization matured late where natural conditions bestow an initial utility on free...

Some scholars find that top-down improvements in women's rights increase societies' value of gender equality at the grassroots, creating pressure for more adoption and enforcement. Others claim that the extension of women's rights is strongly dependent on value change at the grassroots, operating largely as a bottom-up process. We find that top-dow...