Inglehart Ronald

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Political Science

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...

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:

Previous studies of right-wing populist (RWP) parties primarily investigate how domestic factors as well as external forces, such as immigration, incite the emergence and electoral success of RWP parties. Studies examining the link between migration and far-right support have found mixed empirical results, using various measures of immigration. In...

Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - Cultural Backlash - by Pippa Norris

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...

Can a society’s overall level of happiness change? Until recently, it was widely held that happiness fluctuates around set-points, so that neither individuals nor societies can lastingly increase their happiness. However, data from surveys carried out in Russia from 1982 to 2011 show that happiness fell substantially following the collapse of the S...

In the early 1990s, the Russian public held overwhelmingly favorable attitudes toward the United States; in recent years, attitudes toward the United States have been overwhelmingly unfavorable. Analysts often trace this dramatic change to (1) the emergence of Russian-American conflicts such as those in former Yugoslavia and (2) Russian leaders’ at...

Quality of life and one’s subjective evaluation of one’s own happiness and well-being are the conventional focus of psychology and sociology. However, a genetic factor has recently been found to affect the subjective evaluation of well-being. The contribution of heredity to a personal level of happiness and life satisfaction has been estimated at 3...

Cambridge Core - Comparative Politics - Cultural Evolution - by Ronald F. Inglehart

Survey data from countries containing over 90% of the world's population demonstrate that in recent decades, rising levels of economic and physical security have been reshaping human values and motivations, thereby transforming societies. Economic and physical insecurity are conducive to xenophobia, strong in-group solidarity, authoritarian politic...

A society's culture is shaped by the extent to which its people grow up feeling that survival is secure or insecure. This article presents a revised version of modernization theory-Evolutionary Modernization theory-which argues that economic and physical insecurity are conducive to xenophobia, strong in-group solidarity, authoritarian politics and...

Growing up taking survival for granted makes people more open to new ideas and more tolerant of outgroups. Insecurity has the opposite effect, stimulating an Authoritarian Reflex in which people close ranks behind strong leaders, with strong in-group solidarity, rejection of outsiders, and rigid conformity to group norms. The 35 years of exceptiona...

This article builds on research demonstrating that high levels of economic and physical security are conducive to a shift from materialist to postmaterialist valuesand that this shift tends to make people more favorable to important social changes. This article updates this research, demonstrating that: (1) These value changes occur with exceptiona...

We decided to conduct our journal’s first interview with Ronald F. Inglehart – Lowenstein Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (USA), Academic Supervisor of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at National Research University Higher School of Economics (Russia) and Founding President of the World Values Survey Asso...

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

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,...

In this issue of the Journal of Democracy, Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk write that the citizens of many countries are becoming dissatisfied with democracy and increasingly open to nondemocratic alternatives. Although I agree with Foa and Mounk’s central claim that public faith in democracy has eroded during the past two decades while support for no...

Brym’s article in the current issue of this journal is an interesting and well-written discussion of an important topic and it presents a substantial body of evidence, addressing a theoretically significant question. Unfortunately, Brym misinterprets the theory he seeks to refute. He implies that Inglehart’s theory of intergenerational value change...

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...

This book contends that beneath the frenzied activism of the sixties and the seeming quiescence of the seventies, a "silent revolution" has been occurring that is gradually but fundamentally changing political life throughout the Western world. Ronald Inglehart focuses on two aspects of this revolution: a shift from an overwhelming emphasis on mate...

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,...

A discussion of Paul M. Sniderman, Michael Bang Petersen, Rune Slothuus, and Rune Stubager's Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy: Islam, Western Europe, and the Danish Cartoon Crisis - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Ronald Inglehart

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...

Is there a link between feelings of existential insecurity and the strength of religious values? Previous work suggests such a relationship, but proxy measures of insecurity have been limited to noisy aggregate-level indicators, such as each society’s level of per capita GDP. This chapter addresses these issues. We summarize the theory of existenti...

This paper discusses correlations between certain genetic characterestics of the human populations and their aggregate levels of tolerance and happiness. We argue that a major cause of the systematic clustering of genetic characteristics may be climatic conditions linked with relatively high or low levels of parasite. This may lead certain populati...

International research laboratories represent a relatively new form for Russia of organizing the scientific community. They aim to attract leading international scientists as well as young scholars and thus to help increase national research capabilities. This paper analyses the efficiency of international labs in achieving these goals in terms of...

This article analyzes the decline of subjective well-being and a sense of national self-esteem among the Russian people that was linked with the collapse of the communist economic, political and social systems in the 1990s — and a subsequent recovery of subjective well-being that began more recently. Subjective well-being is closely linked with eco...

This article presents evidence for a rising emancipatory spirit, across generations and around the world, in a life domain in which traditional family, fertility and sex (FFS) norms have been most resistant to emancipatory gains since the ages: reproductive freedoms. We propose an explanation of rising emancipative values that integrates several th...

This article 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, we test and confirm Welzel’s Evolutionary Emancipation Theory (EET). When improving existen...

This article examines the hypothesis that, since World War II, there has been intergenerational change in the fundamental values of particular segments of the population in some Western European countries. Values have shifted, as it were, from prioritizing economic security and social order ("acquisitive values") to intellectual and artistic expres...

National accounts of subjective well-being are being considered and adopted by nations. In order to be useful for policy deliberations, the measures of life satisfaction must be psychometrically sound. The reliability, validity, and sensitivity to change of life satisfaction measures are reviewed. The scales are stable under unchanging conditions,...

This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the...

Since the end of the Cold War, security studies have broadened to take into account a wide range of non-military threats ranging from poverty to environmental concerns rather than just national defence. Security scholars, backed by international organizations and a growing number of national governments, have developed the concept of 'human securit...

Responding to recent criticism, this article demonstrates that the Index of Effective Democracy (EDI) developed by Welzel and Inglehart (2008) has scale properties that are fully consistent with the theoretical premises underlying the index’s construction. Empirically, it is shown that the EDI differs from the other existing measures of democracy a...

Against recent criticism, this article demonstrates that the effective democracy index (EDI) has scale properties that are fully consistent with the normative premises of the index's construction logic. Empirically, it is shown that the EDI deviates from all other indices of democracy in a perfectly intended way that incorporates substantiating qua...

Since the end of the Cold War, security studies have broadened to take into account a wide range of non-military threats ranging from poverty to environmental concerns rather than just national defense. Security scholars, backed by international organizations and a growing number of national governments, have developed the concept of Human Security...

North American convergence, economic integration, culture, values, trade, continental integration.

A revised version of modernization theory implies that certain cultural variables (deeply-instilled attitudes among the public of a society) play an important role in democratization—and considerable empirical evidence supports this claim. Nevertheless, these variables are rarely used in econometric analysis of democratization. Why? One important r...

This chapter describes creation and testing of procedures and instruments for use in international comparative research. It describes how the authors began their work with no existing measures of the theoretical concepts, and worked to construct and test a battery of measures for use. The chapter briefly explains the developmental model and its bas...

This paper argues that feelings of agency are linked to human well-being through a sequence of adaptive mechanisms that promote human development, once existential conditions become permissive. In the first part, we elaborate on the evolutionary logic of this model and outline why an evolutionary perspective is helpful to understand changes in valu...

There are two main routes to happiness, one linked with modernization and another with traditional belief systems. In so far as modernization brings greater income, and political and personal freedom, it is conducive to rising subjective well-being - and in recent decades, it has actually made people happier. Economic development helps but its impa...

Mansoor Moaddel, Mark Tessler, and Ronald Inglehart use findings from two national values surveys that were carried out in Iraq in 2004 and 2006 to determine the attitudes of the Sunni Arabs toward Saddam Hussein, which they use as a proxy measure of their attitudes toward the Sunni insurgency and American-led coalition forces.

This article discusses the postmaterialist values, as well as the shift from survival to self-expression. It looks at controversies over the value change thesis and discusses changing political arguments. One section covers intergenerational value change in economically advanced and low-income societies. This article concludes that intergenerationa...

Democratic institutions cannot be set up easily, anywhere, at any time; they are likely to emerge only when certain social and cultural conditions exist. But economic development and modernization push those conditions in the right direction by creating a self-reinforcing process that brings mass participation to politics and thus makes democracy i...

To what extent do migrants carry their culture with them, and to what extent do they acquire the culture of their new home? The answer not only has important political implications; it also helps us understand the extent to which basic cultural values are enduring or malleable; and whether cultural values are traits of individuals or are attributes...

Societies around the world have experienced a flood of information from diverse channels originating beyond local communities and even national borders, transmitted through the rapid expansion of cosmopolitan communications. For more than half a century, conventional interpretations, Norris and Inglehart argue, have commonly exaggerated the potenti...

This article summarizes why political culture studies have been hesitant to analyze the aggregate effect of mass beliefs on democracy. It determines that this has much to do with the widespread assumption that the impact of mass beliefs on democracy can be inferred from individual-level findings. It also illustrates that this assumption actually re...

Investigators from such disparate fields as public opinion research and comparative history agree that foreign occupation tends to provoke nationalist awareness. Engaging this growing body of literature, we focus on the affective side of nationalism—the feeling of national pride—and argue that foreign domination by itself does not necessarily incit...

Until recently, it was widely held that happiness fluctuates around set points, so that neither individuals nor societies can lastingly increase their happiness. Even though recent research showed that some individuals move enduringly above or below their set points, this does not refute the idea that the happiness levels of entire societies remain...

Latin American academic programs and research centers are based on the assumption that Latin America is more than an arbitrary geographic expression: it defines a coherent cultural region, having people with distinctive values and worldviews that make them think differently and behave differently from people of other cultures. But the existence of...

This book is an important tool for understanding how economic, social, political and cultural attitudes differ from one society to another, and how they evolve with economic and technological development. It provides detailed information on social values, religion, economy and politics analyzed by age, educational level, income and sex, and discuss...

Until recently, it was widely held that happiness fluctuates around set points, so that neither individuals nor societies can lastingly increase their happiness. Even though recent research showed that some individuals move enduringly above or below their set points, this does not refute the idea that the happiness levels of entire societies remain...

Students of democracy increasingly emphasize the fact that democracy implies government by the people, not mere "electoral democracy" in which elites hold elections but the citizens have little real influence on their actions. Genuinely "effective democracy" does not simply result from elite cost-benefit calculations. It emerges when ordinary peopl...

In 1971 it was hypothesised that intergenerational value changes were taking place. More than a generation has passed since then, and today it seems clear that the predicted changes have occurred. A large body of evidence, analysed using three different approaches – (1) cohort analysis; (2) comparisons of rich and poor countries; (3) examination of...

This book presents the trends in beliefs and values of people in 85 countries around the world from 1981 to 2004. It shows the cultural differences and similarities between countries and how human values are changing.