POSTMATERIALISM – RONALD FRANKLIN INGLEHART

Introduction
* Postmaterialism emphasizes self-expression and quality of life over economic and physical
security. The term postmaterialism was first coined by American social scientist Ronald
Inglehart in The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western
Publics (1977).
* Until the 1970s, it was nearly universal for individuals to prioritize so-called materialist
values such as economic growth and maintaining order; on the other hand, postmaterialists give
top priority to such goals as environmental protection, freedom of speech, and gender equality.
> The shift, particularly among citizens living in Western countries, reflected a change from an
environment in which one was aware that survival was precarious to a post-World War II world
where most felt that survival could be taken for granted.
> Age cohorts born after World War II in advanced industrial societies spent their formative
years under levels of prosperity that were unprecedented in human history, and the welfare
state reinforced the feeling that survival was secure, producing an intergenerational value
change that has gradually transformed the political and cultural norms of these societies.
> Survey evidence gathered in the United States, western Europe, and Japan since the 1970s
has demonstrated that an intergenerational shift has made central new political issues and
provided the impetus for new political movements.
> The postmodern shift involves an intergenerational change in a wide variety of basic social
norms, from cultural norms linked with ensuring survival of the species to norms linked with
the pursuit of individual well-being.
* Postmaterialism itself is only one aspect of a still broader process of cultural change that has
reshaped the political outlook, religious orientations, gender roles, and sexual mores of
advanced industrial society.
The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies
(1971)
* Inglehart's seminal article, The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in
Post-Industrial Societies (1971) is in many ways a microcosm of his entire career, containing
the essence of his major books and should be seen as emblematic of his arguments,
methodology and conclusions. His first statement on the functional dependency of political
priorities on economic security appeared here.
* It is also an instructive paper in that we see the first explicit reference to Abraham Maslow,
the psychologist whose theory of personality Inglehart generalises to a political sphere. Those
generations who have grown up with war and economic hardship would accord a high priority
to economic security and what Maslow terms the ‘safety needs’.
* Inglehart's sample consisted of Holland, Belgium, Italy, France, Germany and Britain.

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> Hypothesis 1 - Inglehart expects to see that cohorts socialised after World War Two are more
likely to be classified as postbourgeois (‘post-bourgeois’ implies that the demands of the
‘revolutionaries’ were not property-based, but instead were more amorphous quality of life
issues).
> Hypothesis 2 - One would find a greater proportion of people with post-bourgeois leanings
in the mainland European countries. high absolute levels of wealth in a given nation at a given
time would predict relatively high proportions of post-bourgeois respondents among the
cohorts socialised under these conditions; high rates of growth for a given country would
predict relatively large increases in the proportion of post-bourgeois respondents, across that
nation's age-groups.
* Throughout the article, Inglehart underlines the socio-economic aspect – citizens from
wealthier backgrounds will be less acquisitive (acquisitiveness is defined as an overriding
interest in stable prices and a strong criminal justice system) than those from poorer
environments - and the generational element - younger people are invariably less acquisitive
than their elders, if class is held constant.
* He concluded that the coming electoral struggle would see post-bourgeois voters moving en
bloc to ‘parties of movement’ as against ‘parties of order’. The former is essentially the kind
of party responsive to new values and what they may imply, and is less interested in appealing
to a law and order or redistributive constituency. This is a 'new left' idea, as change is typically
an emanation of the left.
> The impulse to conserve may well become stronger in the face of such considerable shifts;
regionalism and ethnocentrism are reasonably certain o f a boost, as the electorates attracted
by these programmes feel disenfranchised by the supranational thrust of politics, a thrust that
also effaces the class cleavage reference point.
> As this line of demarcation gradually becomes less defined and defining, Inglehart argues
that separatism and tribalism gain in momentum.
Silent Revolution (1977)
* Inglehart's most widely known work, The Silent Revolution, was published in 1977. It is a
direct follow-on in content to his 1971 article of the same name. The method of assessing one’s
value preferences is by means of the Postmaterialist Index (PMI). It is obtained by asking
respondents to pick what they believe should be their country’ s top two aims from a list of four
items:
1. Maintaining order in the nation
2. Giving the people more say in important government decisions
3. Fighting rising prices
4. Protecting freedom of speech
* A combined score allows for the following classifications where a person picks the following
combinations as their top two priorities:
(a) 1 & 3: Materialist.
(b) 2 & 4: Postmaterialist.
(c) Any of the other four possible combinations: Mixed.

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By subtracting the percentage of people in category (b) from those in category (a), the PMI is
obtained. Since the full socialisation of those born post-1945, Inglehart argues that the good
economic conditions have served to boost the PMI.
* The third-ranked factor, political party, is decidedly ambiguous, according to Inglehart: does
one's party choice mould one's values or vice versa? In any case, it accounts for just over 50
per cent of the variance due to either of the first two.
* He says that the younger, more educated generations have entirely different political priorities
when compared with their older fellow citizens and:
Western governments have only begun to learn how to cope with the types of
demands which are most salient to the post-Materialist types, and it is not clear that
they will eventually master these problems.
* This era of a 'new politics' shopping basket is not without end; however, it will take big
drops in population levels of education and income to regress the people's concerns to
materialist ones. Deep and durable recessions which may occur would overlay the
postmaterialist stratum of those fully socialised in the abundance of the post - World War
II environment; the demands of any cohorts who grow up in periods of penury would
clash with those of the postmaterialist generation.
* An aspect of Inglehart's style of thinking that recurs again most notably in his current
work is the link between a person's social background and life satisfaction.
> Citing a study by Campbell, Converse and Rogers and their weakly established link
between socio-economic status and satisfaction, Inglehart points to the importance of
stability - the person's aspiration to leave behind their current position in life is attenuated
as the life pattern is reinforced over time.
> People's subjective well-being may well oscillate wildly if their standard of living
shuttles up and down, but a long-term placement serves to dampen dissatisfaction - the
habituation effect.
> It is here that one sees the extent of Inglehart's ambition - to apply a psychological
model of the individual to a psychosocial analysis of the state and what traits it is likely
to imprint on its citizens.
> The wealthy European publics have one contradictory aspect; happy with their lives
generally, but unhappy with the political side of things in their states.
> On an individual level, the professional worker in such states has the highest
satisfaction scores in toto but the lowest satisfaction self-ratings of all job classifications
for the political state of affairs in their country.
* The utility of The Silent Revolution is its in-depth coverage: Inglehart more fully
outlines the causes and effects of PM.
> It draws on diverse literature outside political science and comments on broader
societal changes likely to flow from value shift. For example, one non-party political
implication is a move away from the priority of maximising growth to instead pursue
social equality.

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> The communal aspect of the worker's life is more emergent; this may be gauged by
Inglehart's reference to ‘workers' demands for reorganization of the assembly line into
smaller, more autonomous groups in which each member has a voice in how the job is
done.
> Inglehart further connects the workplace to the political arena, citing the importance of
theorists such as Bell, Lipset, Mannheim and Weber. Inglehart rows in with them and
states that professional workers are more likely to be postmaterialist in their values than
the other job classification members.
> A diffuse societal push for greater democratisation in all domains is emphasised - more
horizontal styles of decision-making are predicted to gain in popularity in schools,
businesses and local government.
Evaluation
* Many scholars view Inglehart’s prediction as a major insight.
> On the back of his most cited book, Culture Shift (1990), Almond argues “Inglehart’s work
is one of the few examples of successful prediction in political science.”
> The authors of the five-volume Beliefs in Government study find overwhelming evidence of
a shift toward postmaterialism, away from religious values, and a shift toward a redefinition of
the Left-Right continuum. Scarbrough, who analyzes Materialist/Postmaterialist orientations,
concludes (1995), “indisputably, across much of Western Europe, value orientations are
shifting.”
> General editors, Kaase and Newton (1995), sum up the findings: “We find substantial support
for the model which traces social changes to value changes, and value changes into political
attitudes and behaviour, especially through the process of generational replacement.”
> Dalton (2008) concludes that in recent decades researchers have advanced theories to explain
how values are changing, but argues that Inglehart’s research has been the most influential.
* Inglehart has studied changes in party systems, democratization and modernization, gender
equality, religion, and the effects of the media upon worldwide culture. Yet, a large part of his
work is about value change.
* Inglehart is among the most cited political scientists in contemporary times.
> Nobutaka Ike says that Inglehart tested his thesis in six West European societies, and
therefore cannot determine whether Western culture influences the effects of industrialization
and economic change. Japan is an industrialized society which, despite some Western
influence, has markedly different traditions than Western Europe. Ike argues that Inglehart’s
results reveal neither intergenerational nor life-cycle change, but rather change among adults.
> Milton Rokeach argues that the two-value model is not an ahistorical one. The equality-
freedom orientation underlying the ideologies or political orientations selected for study here,
it may be argued, can surely not be generalized to ideologies that prevailed a thousand years
ago or to those that might prevail a thousand years hence.

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> Alan Marsh asks whether the conditions to develop postbourgeois values were available in
Britain, which had slow economic growth and high inflation during the 1970s. He also
questions whether these values were a part of the individual’s attitudinal structure “or merely
a fashionable and perhaps slightly cynical pose adopted by those . . . who can personally afford
to be less concerned about material security”.
> Scott C Flanagan raises one basic criticism. Inglehart’s construct of Materialism/
Postmaterialism does not capture the most important value changes occurring in modern
society. Rather, Flanagan argues, one should distinguish between “traditional” and “liberal”
values.