QUANTITATIVE POLITICAL RESEARCH

Quantitative Political Research

Quantitative Political Research

Introduction

This paper has three goals: one is to investigate whether there is convergence or divergence in the values held by individuals across Countries over the last two decades; second, it aims to examine whether values become more secular under the process of modernization; the final goal is to study whether societal development can be regarded as a factor promoting value change. This study will use procedures developed over the last 30 years by cross-cultural psychologists to ensure the equivalence of the value construct being compared across cultural groups, enabling valid conclusions to be drawn about the press of modernity on peoples' value orientation. So, this research could be regarded as a refinement of the paper written byInglehart and Baker (2000) on modernization and value change.

Convergence/divergence of cultures

Globalization, a process by which cultural systems mutually influence each other through exchange processes involving trade, immigration and information, has become a topic of intense interest in all disciplines of the social sciences (Hermans & Kempen, 1998). Robertson (1995), for example, suggested that globalization produces “the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (p. 8). The process of globalization is most strongly felt from the experience of colonization, and the degree of globalization has been intensified by rapid development of telecommunications and increasing interdependence of worldwide trade and financial markets over recent decades (Arnett, 2002 and Hermans and Kempen, 1998).

In the present study, a fundamental dimension of value, viz., traditionalism-secularism, will be used to study the question of convergence or divergence in citizen values. As Inglehart (1997) has argued and shown, a society with more traditional values is characterized by a high regard for God and authority, and economic development is given a higher priority than self-expression. A society with more secular values has the opposite pattern. If convergence of value takes place, values across countries should become more similar, and thus the variation of values held by citizens in those nations will be smaller over time. In contrast, a larger variation of values among countries will be found over time if divergence of values takes place. The standard deviation (SD) in national values across time periods can thus be used as an important indicator of value movement in the national cultures involved in the comparison.

Value change: modernized or traditional?

The second goal of this examine is to study whether, if there is value change, in which direction it moves. Two schools propose opposing views on the relationship of value change and modernization. Some researchers suggest that values should become more modern across countries because modernizing political and economic systems pull the values of citizens functioning in that institutional framework in the same direction. Berger and Huntington (2002, p. 2) suggests that, if there is an “emerging global culture”, and given that this global culture is “heavily American in origin and content”. The values constituting individualism should become more positively evaluated in an emerging global ...