Description
Book SynopsisRonald Inglehart argues that economic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and even, to some extent, predictable patterns. This is a controversial claim. It implies that some trajectories of socioeconomic change are more likely than others--and consequently that certain changes are foreseeable. Once a society has embarked on industrialization, for example, a whole syndrome of related changes, from mass mobilization to diminishing differences in gender roles, is likely to appear. These changes in worldviews seem to reflect changes in the economic and political environment, but they take place with a generational time lag and have considerable autonomy and momentum of their own. But industrialization is not the end of history. Advanced industrial society leads to a basic shift in values, de-emphasizing the instrumental rationality that characterized industrial society. Postmodern values then bring new societal changes, including democratic politic
Trade Review
"[This is] Inglehart's most convincing demonstration of the theory of intergenerational value change, the cornerstone of his scholarship... With data from 43 societies collected over nearly three decades, and representing 70 percent of the world's population ...the analysis of Inglehart's unprecedented comparative dataset is nuanced, sophisticated, and certain to stimulate the kind of criticism that will deepen our understanding of social change."--The Review of Politics "Ronald Inglehart is one of the very few scholars to have remained consistently engaged with both the study of political culture and the development of modernization theory over the past few decades. In Modernization and Postmodernization, he presents the cumulative results of decades of research on the interrelationships among cultural values, democracy, and capitalism. His findings are consistently thought-provoking and often surprising and should inspire prolonged and productive controversy... Overall, Inglehart's fascinating book raises tantalizing questions about the long-term trajectory of value change in modern society."--Stephen E. Hanson, Comparative Politics
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Changing Values and Changing Societies3Ch. 1Value Systems: The Subjective Aspect of Politics and Economics7Ch. 2Individual-Level Change and Societal-Level Change51Ch. 3Modernization and Postmodernization in 43 Societies67Ch. 4Measuring Materialist and Postmaterialist Values108Ch. 5The Shift toward Postmaterialist Values, 1970-1994131Ch. 6Economic Development, Political Culture, and Democracy: Bringing the People Back In160Ch. 7The Impact of Culture on Economic Growth216Ch. 8The Rise of New Issues and New Parties237Ch. 9The Shift toward Postmodern Values: Predicted and Observed Changes, 1981-1990267Ch. 10The Erosion of Institutional Authority and the Rise of Citizen Intervention in Politics293Ch. 11Trajectories of Social Change324App. 1A Note on Sampling: Figures A.1 and A.2343App. 2Partial 1990 WVS Questionnaire, with Short Labels for Items Used in Figure 3.2351App. 3Supplementary Figures for Chapters 3, 9, and 10; Figures A.3 (Chapter 6), A.4-A.21 (Chapter 9), A.22-A.26 (Chapter 10), and A.27 (Chapter 11)357App. 4Construction of Key Indices Used in This Book389App. 5Complete 1990 WVS Questionnaire, with Variable Numbers in ICPSR Dataset393References431Index445
