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Ronald Inglehart: Samuel A. Stouffer Fellow
"The World Values survey, which I had been working on for 25 years in collaboration with scholars in 80 countries around the world, has produced a source of insight into what’s going on in the world today that simply was not available previously. We have shown, I believe, by literally hundreds of publications and in more than a score of languages, that the beliefs, values, and moral norms of ordinary people are changing throughout the world and changing at a predictable trajectory in a coherent way, and that these changes are a major factor of social change. This is an ingredient that I think in ten or fifteen years policy makers will refer to as regularly, as a matter of course, as they refer now to GNP per capita, unemployment rates, fertility rates, and demographic changes. It is part of the picture that couldn’t be understood until relatively recently, because until about 1990, it was not possible to do studies of peoples’ beliefs, values, and so on, on a global basis. Today it is possible to cover almost, not quite, but almost all of the countries in the world. We’re working on Cuba and North Korea, but pretty much the other large populous countries we’ve gotten into. We have found some fascinating things about how changing aspirations, on the part of ordinary citizens, have moved from being a somewhat peripheral part of political and social reality to becoming a major component of what’s going on. One example is the rising movements towards democratization, which reflect changing priorities and rising emphasis on self-expression values. That is, leading people to increasingly scrutinize their leaders, putting pressure on them to be responsive. In the last fifteen years the number of democracies around the world has expanded, and with measures of belief systems in 80-some countries and system level variables like democracy, you can actually make the link to what’s in the minds of ordinary people. That turns out to be astonishingly powerful ...
"One of the findings in the analyses of democratization is that it’s rising. There is growing pressure in countries around the world for democracy. Our findings reveal that in every one of more than 80 countries surveyed, the majority of the population view democracy as a desirable form of government. This crosses cultural, economic, and geographic lines; it’s true of most Islamic countries, it’s true of China. It is a broad aspiration. On the other hand, the bad news is that democracy is intimately linked with certain beliefs in peoples’ minds. There’s a lot of literature suggesting trust is conducive to democracy. We’re not going to measure to what extent individual beliefs like trust are linked to the extent to which a society is democratic. We find that it is one of the ingredients. But, actually, certain other ingredients, tolerance, particularly, and a participatory outlook are even stronger influences on democratization. These are not evenly spread around the world. Democracy is a general aspiration; free choice seems to be the universal human aspiration. But feelings of tolerance and of participatory emphasis on self expression are not evenly spread. It is not something that’s an easy job, but changes the trajectories by which this emphasis on democracy can be encouraged or inhibited. I think one of the findings is that it’s not an easy job. You can’t just walk in and hand people a democratic constitution and assume it’s going to work. It’s something that requires a deeper foundation that I wish it wouldn’t. I wish we could just hand out the right constitution and be democratic. But it seems to go deeper than that and I think this is a type of information that policy makers will take increasingly into account."
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The views expressed herein are solely the opinions of the individuals and not those of the Academy. |
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