Economic Security and Value Change

Abstract

Confirming Inglehart's prediction (1971) of an intergenerational shift toward postmaterialist values, a time series analysis controlling for the joint effects of inflation and unemployment demonstrates that there is a statistically significant trend toward postmaterialism in all eight West European countries for which data are available over the past two decades. Evidence from the 1981–83 and 1990–91 World Values Surveys indicates that this value shift occurs in any society that has experienced sufficient economic growth in recent decades so that the preadult experiences of younger birth cohorts were significantly more secure than those of older cohorts. Large intergenerational differences tend to be found in societies that have experienced rapid growth in gross national product per capita, and are negligible in societies that have had little or no growth. Accordingly, postmaterialism increased in 18 of the 20 societies on five continents for which we have comparable data over the past decade.