Political Stability, Confidence in the Future, and Values

According to the literature, modernization is associated with cultural change along the two value dimensions: from survival to self-expression/emancipative values and from traditional to secular-rational values. This value change has generally been viewed as the product of both material and non-material forces; however, previous studies have used mainly material proxies for non-material, social, and psychological variables. Instead, in this paper, we propose and test a modified theoretical model that allows us to assess both the direct and indirect effects of material conditions, such as economic wealth and political stability, on emancipative and secular values by including variables that capture non-material factors, such as the respondents’ fears about their economic future and about the possible destabilization of the political systems in which they live. We conduct empirical analyses both at the individual level, using the cross-sectional data from the World Values Survey, and at the aggregate level. Both sets of analyses revealed that fears about the stability of the political system are the single most significant determinant of value change.