Changing Values in Advanced Industrial Societies

Abstract

Ronald Inglehart has demonstrated the important political and behavioral implications of value change in advanced industrial societies. In an effort to enhance our understanding of this politically relevant “silent revolution,” an alternate theory of value change is presented, contrasting Inglehart's “needs theory” approach with a “functional constraints” theoretic construct. It is then argued that both kinds of value change are taking place, the first a change in the priorities attached to economic as opposed to noneconomic, value issues as measured by a materialism-nonmaterialism scale, and the second a change in basic social value preferences as measured by an authoritarian-libertarian scale. It is further argued that Inglehart's acquisitive-postbourgeois value scale combines both of these value priority and value preference dimensions. Relying primarily on Japanese data, it is demonstrated that these two subdimensions have sharply contrasting properties in both their causal origins and behavioral properties and hence are preferably kept distinct. Finally it is shown that the alternate theory and measurement of value change presented here overcome several problems in the Inglehart approach.