World Values Survey
Jan. 1st, 2006 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinSomething to ponder as you start the new year: The World Values Survey. They asked people in lots of countries an enormous list of questions about moral and social values, family life, religion, etc. and did lots of principal components analysis on it and such stuff. The mid-Nineties-style, frames-besotted site design offends my values, but if you poke around enough you can find some good stuff in there. There's a section now where you can access their database and do cross-comparisons on specific questions between the countries of your choice.
Their grand summary is the Inglehart Values Map, concerning what they think are the two largest components that show up in their data. It looks at first glance like yet another two-axis Nolan Graph-like political orientation map, but the dimensions aren't quite the same. One axis corresponds to "traditional" versus "secular-rational" values, which is more or less how religious the society is; the other measures "survival" versus "self-expression" values, that is, whether the society places emphasis on securing and protecting what it takes to get by (usually characteristic of poorer countries) or on individual expression and self-actualization (usually richer ones where people don't have to worry so much about survival).
There are countries almost all over the chart, lumpable into cultural/geographic blocs. The former Soviet and Yugoslavian countries have the values of poor but fairly secular people, though there's a lot of scatter. The global south tends toward religious traditionalism but Latin America tends somewhat more toward self-expression values. Protestant North and Central Europe is the stereotypical epitome of secular progressivism, the rest of Europe less so.
I first saw a version of this chart a couple of years ago. The thing that struck me about it, and that I did not expect, is that it's a blow to the American exceptionalism of both the US's cheerleaders and its most passionate detractors. I think I saw it in a British paper, and the article emphasized the unusual status of the United States as a more traditional/religious culture than most rich countries. But it's situated in a bloc of English-speaking countries with fairly similar values. Within that bloc, Great Britain itself seems a mild outlier, pulled slightly toward the European cluster compared to its former colonies. Of course, the outsize military and economic power wielded by the US mean that its values have more of an effect on people elsewhere than other countries in the bloc; but this is a separate issue.
The differences in (average) personal values between US and Canadian respondents are startlingly small, though perhaps exaggerated in popular discourse by contingencies of recent politics and by the two countries' common tendency toward passionate nationalistic feeling. Canada is slightly more secular-rationalist than the US, but it is not Sweden. Australia is in between.
It would be fascinating to see a version of the map plotted by region within the United States and within Canada (especially Quebec); I'd guess that the internal scatter would cover a non-negligible region on the chart, but I could also be wrong about that!
You can also compare results over time for individual survey questions. The last survey for which they have compiled results online was taken in 1999, and it sounds as if they're taking another one. It will be interesting to see how much things have changed in the past few years, but even though we think of recent history as cataclysmic, I seriously doubt our values have changed that much in general. One of the charts near the bottom of that page shows trends in the big Values Map between 1980 and 1991, but I can't compare it very well to the top map since the units on the axes don't seem to be the same.
It does look to me as if, while the religious right became a more powerful and mobilized presence in American politics, the US doesn't seem to have actually been getting much more traditionalist. The responses to most individual questions about religion and family and sexual values don't really show much of a monotonic trend; most are almost flat, some of the ones about supernatural beliefs might show a tiny increase in religiosity, but a few trended rapidly less traditionalist (tolerance for divorce and homosexuality, for instance, increased rapidly from 1982 to 1999). The 1999 US sample seemed to have been more highly educated than the previous ones; I don't know whether this represents an actual trend or is just a potential source of bias.
Some questions show wild patternless swings, maybe because of something turning into a media hot-button issue; there's one about single mothers that I think might have been knocked silly just by the 1992 Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown pseudo-controversy.
Their grand summary is the Inglehart Values Map, concerning what they think are the two largest components that show up in their data. It looks at first glance like yet another two-axis Nolan Graph-like political orientation map, but the dimensions aren't quite the same. One axis corresponds to "traditional" versus "secular-rational" values, which is more or less how religious the society is; the other measures "survival" versus "self-expression" values, that is, whether the society places emphasis on securing and protecting what it takes to get by (usually characteristic of poorer countries) or on individual expression and self-actualization (usually richer ones where people don't have to worry so much about survival).
There are countries almost all over the chart, lumpable into cultural/geographic blocs. The former Soviet and Yugoslavian countries have the values of poor but fairly secular people, though there's a lot of scatter. The global south tends toward religious traditionalism but Latin America tends somewhat more toward self-expression values. Protestant North and Central Europe is the stereotypical epitome of secular progressivism, the rest of Europe less so.
I first saw a version of this chart a couple of years ago. The thing that struck me about it, and that I did not expect, is that it's a blow to the American exceptionalism of both the US's cheerleaders and its most passionate detractors. I think I saw it in a British paper, and the article emphasized the unusual status of the United States as a more traditional/religious culture than most rich countries. But it's situated in a bloc of English-speaking countries with fairly similar values. Within that bloc, Great Britain itself seems a mild outlier, pulled slightly toward the European cluster compared to its former colonies. Of course, the outsize military and economic power wielded by the US mean that its values have more of an effect on people elsewhere than other countries in the bloc; but this is a separate issue.
The differences in (average) personal values between US and Canadian respondents are startlingly small, though perhaps exaggerated in popular discourse by contingencies of recent politics and by the two countries' common tendency toward passionate nationalistic feeling. Canada is slightly more secular-rationalist than the US, but it is not Sweden. Australia is in between.
It would be fascinating to see a version of the map plotted by region within the United States and within Canada (especially Quebec); I'd guess that the internal scatter would cover a non-negligible region on the chart, but I could also be wrong about that!
You can also compare results over time for individual survey questions. The last survey for which they have compiled results online was taken in 1999, and it sounds as if they're taking another one. It will be interesting to see how much things have changed in the past few years, but even though we think of recent history as cataclysmic, I seriously doubt our values have changed that much in general. One of the charts near the bottom of that page shows trends in the big Values Map between 1980 and 1991, but I can't compare it very well to the top map since the units on the axes don't seem to be the same.
It does look to me as if, while the religious right became a more powerful and mobilized presence in American politics, the US doesn't seem to have actually been getting much more traditionalist. The responses to most individual questions about religion and family and sexual values don't really show much of a monotonic trend; most are almost flat, some of the ones about supernatural beliefs might show a tiny increase in religiosity, but a few trended rapidly less traditionalist (tolerance for divorce and homosexuality, for instance, increased rapidly from 1982 to 1999). The 1999 US sample seemed to have been more highly educated than the previous ones; I don't know whether this represents an actual trend or is just a potential source of bias.
Some questions show wild patternless swings, maybe because of something turning into a media hot-button issue; there's one about single mothers that I think might have been knocked silly just by the 1992 Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown pseudo-controversy.
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Date: 2006-01-02 12:25 am (UTC)