by Ronald Inglehart
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Ronald 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 political institutions and the decline of state socialist regimes. To demonstrate the powerful links between belief systems and political and socioeconomic variables, this book draws on a unique database, the World Values Surveys. This database covers a broader range than ever before available for looking at the impact of mass publics on political and social life. It provides information from societies representing 70 percent of the world's population--from societies with per capita incomes as low as $300 per year to those with per capita incomes one hundred times greater and from long-established democracies with market economies to authoritarian states.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Modernization Theory is Not a Dead Horse, 2007-08-12
Modernization Theory holds that industrialization, and the subsequent economic development is linked with cultural, political, and economic changes. Additionally, Modernization Theory argues that these linkages and changes can and do form coherent and predictable patterns. However, one of the critiques of Modernization Theory has to do with causality. Both the Marxist and Weberian schools are in agreement with the basic premise that economic, political, and cultural change form coherent patterns, but diverge in regards to the catalysts of said change. The Marxist camp argues that economic and technological change drives political and social change, while the Weberian school postulates that cultural aspects drive economic and political change.
Inglehart, however, suggests that the deterministic arguments posed by both the Marxists and Weberians are oversimplified. Rather, Inglehart argues that economic, political, and cultural variables are mutually dependent and intertwined. He writes, "if you know one component you can predict the other components with far better than random success" (331). Inglehart further critiques Modernization Theory for its emphasis on linearity. Rather than moving in one continuous direction, the author argues that there is a fundamental change in values and motivations, this being the shift to Postmodernization.
With these two critiques, as well as rebuke of the supposed ethnocentricity of the theory, and the assumption that Modernization leads to democracy, Inglehart pursues a new model of economic, political, and cultural change which composes his Modernization and Postmodernization thesis.
Inglehart argues that during the Modernization phase a society undergoes economic, cultural, and political changes. "Economic development is linked with a syndrome of changes that includes not only industrialization, but also urbanization, mass education, occupational specialization, bureaucratization, and communications development, which in turn are linked with still broader cultural, social, and political changes" (8).
We see individuals moving away from status based on ascription, towards status based on achievement; we see a move towards rational-legal authority structures, etc. Additionally, during this time, individual values are based on achieving economic security and material gain. However, as Inglehart points out, advanced industrial societies eventually reach a level of marginal rate of return on economic growth. When a society reaches this threshold, we begin to see a fundamental change in values and institutional structures, or a move to a Postmodern Society. Inglehart writes, "Postmodernism is the rise in new values and lifestyles, with greater toleration for ethnic, cultural, and sexual diversity and individual choice concerning the kind of life one wants to lead" (23). In short, economic growth eventually reaches a point of marginal utility and accompanying value and motivational changes occur.
In explaining the Postmodern transition, Inglehart discusses extensively the theory of Intergenerational Value Change. He writes, "This shift in worldview and motivations springs from the fact that there is a fundamental difference between growing up with awareness that survival is precarious, and growing up with the feeling that one's survival is precarious, and growing up with the feeling that one's survival can be taken for granted" (31). The post-WWII generation experienced high levels of economic growth coupled with the rise of the welfare state. This granted them a great deal of economic and social security. This security allowed society to pursue Postmodern values. The transition to Postmodern values has eroded many of the institutions which characterized industrial/modern society: (1) in a secure environment, people seek the stability of a strong government - such rational-legal authority is no longer in the Postmodern society; (2) this environment of stability/security lessens the importance placed on economic growth; although the Postmodern society has lower rates of economic growth, the subjective happiness of a society is high; (3) traditional social structures also decline in importance, i.e. less importance is placed on religion, the familial structure, sexual norms etc.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Post modernization and post materialism expanded, 2006-11-06
Inglehart, one of the pioneers of modern political culture research, has expanded his previous studies, based on mainly US and European research to include those countries where the World Value Surveys are conducted. The book is well illustrated and written, empirically solid and it goes without saying that the traditional paradigm used now gets a more general validation with the inclusion of new countries.
The ecologial variables included now also expands the implications of what the change to post-materialist values means. Still, a considerable part of the book, especially the theoretical part, gives a "deja vue" experience. It would be nice to get some really new ideas from the discoverer of post-materialism, and not just new amassment of data. But granted that the samples used in this book are from completely new and different contexts, it is satifying to see that the post-materialist silent revolution was not really a 1968 cohort industrialist phenomenon, something that critics have said of Ingleharts previous works. The book updates the more theoretically innovative Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, and can be used as a course book in political culture classes.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
best data on global change, 2006-10-05
Ignore the only other review about this book, which is tremendously silly and obviously written from a right-wing perspective. It is not true that Inglehart opposes materialist and postmaterialist values against tradition: in fact he creates a multi-dimensional model in which the opposition between materialist and postmaterialist values make up one axis, while the opposition between traditional and secular-rational authority constitutes a separate axis. Thus, the US is situated in this model as a society whose people prioritize postmaterialist values but ALSO favor (more slightly) traditional over secular-rational forms of authority. This combination of postmaterialism and tradition seems to explain a lot about Americans today: they increasingly favor qualitative values like free expression, choice, and life satisfaction over quantitative values like money and technology, and yet they adhere more to traditional forms of authority like religion, the family, and nation while being distrustful of secular institutions and the government.
Inglehart's thesis is that cultural, political, and economic changes cluster together and change in relatively predictable ways. Societies undergo tremendous changes as they modernize, industrialize, bureaucratize, urbanize, and so forth, but then they hit a point of diminishing returns when the survival of most people can be guaranteed and scarcity is no longer an issue. This is the point where people seek out postmaterialist values, because the search for more money leaves them existentially empty, and so they seek out more substantive forms of satisfaction and meaning. Perhaps this is the only common ground among Americans of the blue and red states: obviously they aren't simply voting in terms of economic self-interest (in which case their political affiliations would be reversed) but rather on the basis of cultural values: ecology and tolerance for the blue states, God and nation for the red states.
Yes, Inglehart's politics are somewhat leftist, and he does argue that his data supports much of what Marx had to say about modernization, but above all he is a scientist and an empiricist who is most concerned with perfecting his techniques of measurement. That's why it's so ridiculous to dismiss him as politically biased as the previous reviewer and a number of other critics seem to do. The amount of data is this book is astounding. And yet it is still imminently readable, and unlike so much other social science, does not fetishize its methods of data analysis as an end in itself.
The only reason to give this work 4 stars instead of 5 is that I think Inglehart has a hard time explaining the resurgence of fundamentalism that has swept through the world recently. He somewhat persuasively argues that Islamic fundamentalism has taken hold in societies that may be oil-rich but certainly aren't modernized, but when it comes to the US he maintains that religion is declining in influence and that the Christian right is just more organized today in defense of its evaporating power. I'd really like to believe that. But if that's true, why do so many of my damn students wear crosses and "WWJD" bracelets?
32 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
 Opinion Polls are no substitute for objective research, 1999-03-10
Ronald Inglehart looks at a database of changes in public opinion in 43 countries and finds that, around 1990, a majority of people in the U.S. and other advanced industrial societies ranked "postmodern" or "postmaterialist" values above "modern" or "materialist" values. In third place and rapidly disappearing is "traditional" values. These new attitudes have important implications for marketing products and for politics. The rise of Green parties in Europe, for example, is an expected development from these underlying cultural changes. (A similar development has been delayed in the U.S. because we don't allow fractional voting or proportional representation.) For people interested in politics, this is familiar territory. It was covered by William Maddox and Stuart Lilie's 1984 book, "Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum," Alvin Toffler's work, David Boaz's edited collection for the Cato Institute, "Left, Right and Babyboom: America's New Politics," (1986) and many editorials in Reason, Forbes FYI, and similar publications. Inglehart says this is the first empirical research to find these trends are shared by all developed countries, that postmodernists now outnumber modernists and traditionalists, and that culture can change or be changed by economic conditions. I found this to be a valuable piece of research, but was repeatedly put off by the decidedly leftist slant of Inglehart's work. The book is riddled with references to Marxist history, economics, psychology, and sociology. He is often saying Marx "made an important contribution in this area" but that recent events have proven him wrong, but perhaps his underlying theory was correct. The conservative "goal" of "laissez faire capitalism" is seldom mentioned without referring to the "savage injustices" that accompanied that brief period when such a system existed, and how government intervention "saved" us from this plight. Inglehart has similar opinions on religious belief, which is variously defined as reactionary, nativist, and potentially violent. The idea that an organized religion would be hospitable to reason and science appears never to cross Inglehart's mind, though any student of history (or contemporary Catholic) knows otherwise. A few tips of an author's ideological hat doesn't hurt an otherwise good piece of work, but this author's anti-market and anti-religious beliefs are on display on every page. I was left doubting his ability to report the truth. The opinion surveys Inglehart relies on are problematic in many ways, some of which he admits. What does it mean when someone says he puts a "higher priority" on emotion or ideas than on reason and science? Clearly not that he wishes to live in a society without reason and science. Maybe he is sending a signal to the pollster that he is trying to get in touch with his spiritual self? Or maybe he is uncomfortable being called upon to defend reason and science, not having had any training in either, and would rather defend imagination and emotion, for which any answer is the right one? Similarly, the whole ranking exercise is dubious because there are no consequences for ranking too highly things one might wish for or admire in abstract but seldom use or respect in practice. This is a common failure of opinion surveys. Inglehart's citations purporting to show how values influence behavior is off the mark; we know they do, the question is whether his ranking exercise accurately captures those values that influence behavior. This book came highly recommended and I looked forward to its insights. I was more than a little disappointed.
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