Research in Context: Measuring Value Change

Abramson and Inglehart find a significant trend toward postmaterialist values in Western Europe, which they argue is largely driven by the gradual processes of generational replacement. Clarke, Dutt, and Rapkin argue that this trend is a methodological artifact of the wording of Inglehart's four-item measure of materialist/ postmaterialist values. They claim that because this battery does not include a question about unemployment, in periods of high unemployment respondents tend to choose postmaterialist goals. The long-term trend toward postmaterialism in Western Europe, they argue, results from rising levels of unemployment during the past two decades. Abramson and Inglehart point out that increases in inflation have a short-term impact on decreasing postmaterialism, but maintain that the positive relationship between unemployment and postmaterialism is spurious. As this analysis shows, Clarke, Dutt, and Rapkin find a positive relationship between unemployment and postmaterialism by building a model that has little theoretical justification and that is not robust to changes in specification. As this analysis demonstrates, unemployment is actually linked with support for materialist goals, and the trend toward post-materialism is robust in the face of alternative time frames, models, and specifications. The weight of the evidence demonstrates that the long-term trend toward postmaterialism in Western Europe is driven by generational replacement.     

何为现代化

本文是两位政治学家为《布莱克维尔社会学百科全书》所撰写的词条。内容涉及现代化的含义,现代化理论的缘起、发展过程和不同流派,现代化所包含的六个维度,现代化在系统层面、个体层面和社会关系层面等三个视野中所体现出来的总性体特征,以及现代化与文化变迁、民主、人类发展和社会资本的关系。     

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Understanding Human Security

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 security’, focusing on the welfare of ordinary people against a broad range of threats. This has aroused vigorous debate. The first part of this article proposes an analytical model of human security. The second part argues that it is important to measure how ordinary people perceive risks, moving beyond state‐centric notions of human security. New evidence is examined that draws upon survey items specially designed to monitor perceptions of human security, included for the first time in the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), with fieldwork conducted in 2010–12. The third part demonstrates that people distinguish three dimensions – national, community and personal security – and then explores some structural determinants driving these perceptions. The fourth part discusses why perceptions of human security matter, particularly for explaining cultural values and value change around the world. The conclusion argues that the shift from a narrow focus on military security toward the broader concept of human security is a natural response to the changing challenges facing developed societies, in which the cost‐benefit ratio concerning war has become negative and cultural changes have made war less acceptable. In this setting, valid measures of perceptions of human security have become essential, both to understand the determinants of the concept among ordinary people and to analyze their consequences.     

Changing Values among Western Publics from 1970 to 2006

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 actual trends observed over the past 35 years – all points to the conclusion that major cultural changes are occurring, and that they reflect a process of intergenerational change linked with rising levels of existential security.     

Party identification and party closeness in comparative perspective

The present analysis uses data from 1974 and 1981 U. S. cross sections, which incorporate a panel, to compare the standard NES measure of party identification (ID) with a measure of partisanship derived from a party closeness question widely employed in cross-national research. Important features of the two scales are examined by transforming the closeness measure into a scale of very close, fairly close, not very close, and no preference corresponding to the seven-point ID scale. The scales are highly correlated and are similar in their reliability. More than 75% of the independents in the ID scale choose a party in the closeness version, and over half of these select the fairly close category. Respondents do not volunteer that they are independents when that alternative is not stated in the question.     

Demokratisierung und Freiheitsstreben: Die Perspektive der Humanentwicklung

Much of the literature on democratic transitions presumes that mass attitudes are important for the consolidation of democracies but not for the process of democratization. We challenge this premise on the basis of human development theory. From the perspective of this theory, democratization is an emancipative achievement that should be fuelled by broader emancipative forces among the population. Using the Values Surveys we measure these emancipative forces by people’s liberty aspirations, showing that mass liberty aspirations have a causal effect on a society’s democratic development. No other factor, not GDP/capita and not social capital, can explain away the effect of liberty aspirations on democratization. We conclude that human development theory illuminates emancipative forces in democratization that have so far been neglected.     

Change in Dutch political culture: A silent or a silenced revolution?

Dutch political culture is often regarded as an important example of the rise and spread of ‘New Politics’ since the late 1960s. Recently, some authors have argued that such expectations about changes in political values, political interest, political participation, and the party system would not survive empirical testing. However, by taking rates of change rather than absolute levels, by re‐examining the evidence in the light of more recent data, and by distinguishing short‐term period effects from a long‐term trend, it is shown that tremendous changes in Dutch political culture have taken place, and are still taking place.     

A European Security Policy? The Attitudes of Candidates for the European Parliament*

It has been argued that the credibility of the American nuclear deterrent is declining in Western Europe. Whether this is true or not, it seems clear that support for the NATO alliance had reached a remarkably low level among Western European political elites as the 1970s drew to a close. One possible alternative to continued reliance on the Atlantic Alliance would be for Western Europe to develop its own independent defence capabilities. Certainly, in terms of economic and technological resources, this option should be within reach of an integrated European Community. And indeed there seems to be widespread support among European political leaders for the principle of having Western Europe play a more independent role vis-à-vis both superpowers. But there is no clear consensus in favour of the increased defence expenditures that such a policy would entail. Nor is there a consensus in favour of developing a unified West European security system inside or outside the institutional framework of the European Community. Our evidence in support of these conclusions is based on interviews carried out with candidates for the European Parliament in all nine member countries during the months immediately preceding the first direct elections in June, 1979.     

Emancipative values and democracy: Response to Hadenius and Teorell

This article demonstrates that Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell’s attempt to disprove a causal effect of emancipative mass orientations on democracy is flawed in each of its three lines of reasoning. First, contrary to Hadenius and Teorell’s claim that measures of “effective democracy” end up in meaningless confusion of democracy and minor aspects of its quality, we illustrate that additional qualifications of democracy illuminate meaningful differences in the effective practice of democracy. Second, Hadenius and Teorell’s finding that emancipative orientations have no significant effect on subsequent measures of democracy from Freedom House is highly unstable: using only a slightly later measure of the dependent variable, the effect turns out to be highly signficant. Third, we illustrate that these authors’ analytical strategy is irrelevant to the study of democratization because the temporal specification they use misses almost all cases of democratization. We present a more conclusive model of democratization, analyzing how much a country moved toward or away from democracy as the dependent variable. The model shows that emancipative orientations had a strong effect on democratization during the most massive wave of democratization ever—stronger than any indicator of economic development. Finally, we illustrate a reason why this is so: emancipative orientations motivate emancipative social movements that aim at the attainment, sustenance, and extension of democratic freedoms.