POST MATERIALISM

Post Materialism and Politics

Post Materialism and Politics

Introduction

Different social scientists have different arguments about the major changes that have seen in the field of politics. These events have been occurred in the post-industrial era and societies situated in the area of Western Europe., Australia, Asia and North America from 1960s. The change in these areas includes partisan de-alignment that is accompanied by a collapse in the orientations of traditional politics. The manifestation of social movements and influencing use of the methods and forms of non-traditional types of the politics is a reason of something else also. If we further analyze the situation of that time we can see that it is due to the new politics of post-materialist thesis that was presented by Ronald Inglehart. If we analyze the situation we can find that the post industrial societies start changing from the time of Second World War. During the World War II the region of North America, Australia, Asia and Western Europe came under the influence of social pressure which triggered various movements and hence the post materialist age was started (Stolle, Hooghe&Micheletti, 2005, Pp. 245-269).

The social change pressurized the material well being of the people and people start to bother about their culture and identity. There was also a movement which included the involvement of students in the time of 1960s, the feminist's movements and the environmentalists. This social change also involves other people who were concerned about the international peace and they started movements like peace movement and anti nuclear movements. This social change was from 1960s to 1980s that is almost two decades. The result which was seen of these social movements was the motivation of protesting the politics. Another thing which changes due to rise of these movements was the fall of the traditional movements and the organizing of the movements of citizens apart from those who were already working in the political structure and political institutions (Middendorp, 1992, Pp. 249-260).

Discussion

If we look at the reason of post materialist politics and the change in socio-economical culture of the world we can observed that in post industrialist era the people were not mostly aware of their rights and the for this solid reason the traditional forms of politics was seen prevailing across the world. After the Second World War when the people across the world saw that there has been the infringement of their basic rights they started to object to that political structure. In addition to this various movements started to pressurize the political parties and the structure of that politics started to change (Inglehart, 1997, Pp. n.d.).

The movement which played an important role in influencing the governments of that time includes the environmentalist, feminists, peace movements and anti nuclear movements. Here arises a question that is the change was sudden or the Second World War was a tipping point? The researches show that the change was a result of those un-social acts and injustice which resulted in loss of several ...