World Values Survey

World Values Survey

Founded	1981
Type	Non profit association
Location	Secretariat in Stockholm, Sweden, Archive in Madrid
Key people	President Ronald Inglehart, Vice President: Christian Welzel, Secretary General: Bi Puranen, Treasurer: Catalina Romero, Members of the Executive Committee: Yilmaz Esmer, Shen Mingming, Permanent advisor: Juan Díez-Nicolás
Website	www.worldvaluessurvey.org

The World Values Survey is a global research project that explores people’s values and beliefs, how they change over time and what social and political impact they have. It is carried out by a worldwide network of social scientists who, since 1981, have conducted representative national surveys in almost 100 countries. The WVS is the only source of empirical data on attitudes covering a majority of the world’s population (nearly 90%).

The WVS measures, monitors and analyzes: Support for Democracy, Tolerance of foreigners and ethnic minorities, Support for Gender equality, The role of Religion and changing levels of religiosity, The impact of globalization, Attitudes toward the Environment, Work, Family, Politics, National Identity, Culture, Diversity, Insecurity, and Subjective Well-being.

The findings are valuable for policy makers seeking to build civil society and democratic institutions in developing countries. The work is also frequently used by governments around the world, scholars, students, journalists and international organizations and institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations (UNDP and UN-Habitat). Data from the World Values Survey have for example been used to better understand the motivations behind events such as the 2010-2011 Middle East and North Africa protests, the 2005 French civil unrest, the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Yugoslav wars and political upheaval in the 1990s.

Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy and the tenth President of European Commission has said about the work of WVS: “The growing globalization of the world makes it increasingly important to understand [...] diversity. People with varying beliefs and values can live together and work together productively, but for this to happen it is crucial to understand and appreciate their distinctive worldviews”.

Key Insights

The WVS has over the years demonstrated that people’s beliefs play a key role in economic development, the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions, the rise of gender equality, and the extent to which societies have effective government. Some of the key findings of the work are described below.

How culture varies

Analysis of WVS data reveals that there are two major dimensions of cross cultural variation in the world: 1) Traditional values versus Secular-rational values and 2) Survival values versus Self expression values. The global cultural map (below) shows how scores of societies are located on these two dimensions. Moving from south to north on this map reflects the shift from Traditional values to Secular-rational and moving from west to east reflects the shift from Survival Values to Self–expression values.

Traditional values emphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.

Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. These societies place less emphasis on religion, authority, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable.

Industrialization tends to bring a shift from traditional values to secular-rational ones. With the rise of the knowledge society, cultural change moves in a new direction. The transition from industrial society to knowledge society is linked to a shift from Survival values to Self-expression values. In knowledge societies, an increasing share of the population has grown up taking survival for granted.

Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. It is linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.

Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life.

Examples:

A recreation of the Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map of the World, created by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel based on the World Values Survey.

• Societies that have high scores in Traditional and Survival values: Zimbabwe, Morocco,Jordan, Bangladesh.
• Societies with high scores in Traditional and Self expression values: the U.S., most of Latin America, Ireland
• Societies with high scores in Secular-rational and Survival values: Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Estonia
• Societies with high scores in Secular-rational and Self expression values: Sweden, Norway, Japan, the Netherlands.

Aspirations for Democracy

The desire for free choice and autonomy is a universal human aspiration, but it is not top priority when people grow up feeling that survival is uncertain. As long as physical survival remains uncertain, the desire for physical and economic security tends to take higher priority than democracy. When basic physiological and safety needs are fulfilled there is a growing emphasis on self-expression values. Findings from the WVS demonstrate that mass self-expression values are extremely important in the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions in a society. With industrialization and the rise of postindustrial society, generational replacement makes self expression values become more wide spread and countries with authoritarian regimes come under growing mass pressure for political liberalization. This process contributed to the dramatic Third Wave Democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is one of the factors contributing to more recent processes of democratization.

Empowerment of citizens

WVS researchers have identified how the empowerment of ordinary citizens can lead to democracy. This process of human development enables and motivates people to demand democracy, leading to regime changes that entitle people to govern their lives. Growing action resources (such as education), and the spread of self expression values leads to the emergence of democratic institutions, that enable people to gain growing freedom of choice in how to live their own lives, and to choose their political regime.

Globalization and converging values

During the past 30 years, the world has witnessed profound changes in political, economic and social spheres and increasingly rapid technological advances. This is often attributed to the phenomenon of globalization. Capital markets are today integrated around the globe and movies and books circle the world in seconds. Hundreds of millions of people visit the same websites, watch the same TV channels and laugh at the same jokes. These examples have contributed to the belief that globalization brings converging values, or a McDonaldization of the world. In fact, analysis of data from the World Values Survey demonstrate that mass values have not been converging over the past three decades. Norms concerning marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation show dramatic changes but virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving in the same direction, at roughly similar speeds. This has brought a parallel movement, without convergence. Moreover, while economically advanced societies have been changing rather rapidly, countries that remained economically stagnant showed little value change. As a result, there has been a growing divergence between the values prevailing values in low-income countries and high-income countries.

Gender values

Findings from the WVS indicate that support for gender equality is not just a consequence of democratization. It is part of a broader cultural change that is transforming industrialized societies with mass demands for increasingly democratic institutions. Although a majority of the world’s population still believes that men make better political leaders than women, this view is fading in advanced industrialized societies, and also among young people in less prosperous countries.

Religion

The data from the World Values Survey cover several important aspects of people’s religious orientation. One of them tracks how involved people are in religious services and how much importance they attach to their religious beliefs. In the data from 2000, 98% of the public in Indonesia said that religion was very important in their lives while in China only three percent considered religion very important. Another aspect concerns people’s attitudes towards the relation between religion and politics and whether they approve of religious spokesmen who try to influence government decisions and people’s voting preferences.

Happiness and life satisfaction

The WVS has shown that from 1981 to 2007 happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries for which long-term data are available. Since 1981, economic development, democratization, and rising social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world. The popular statistics website Nationmaster publishes a simplified world happiness scale derived from the WVS data. The WVS website provides access to the WVS data, allowing users to carry out more complex analyses, such as comparing happiness levels over time or across socio-economic groups. One of the most striking shifts measured by the WVS was the sharp decline in happiness experienced in Russian and many other excommunist countries during the 1990s.

History

The World Values Survey first emerged out of the European Values Study (EVS) in 1981, when the methods of a successful European study were extended to 14 countries outside Europe. The 1981 study covered 22 countries worldwide. The EVS was conducted under the aegis of Jan Kerkhofs and Ruud de Moor and continues to be based in the Netherlands at the Tilburg University. The leading figure in the early extension of the surveys around the world was Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan in the United States.

The survey was repeated after an interval of about 10 years in the second of what came to be termed "waves". One of the aims of the project came to be the longitudinal (as well as cross-cultural) measurement of variation of values. Further waves followed the second wave at intervals of approximately 5 years.

Due to the European origin of the project, the early waves of the WVS were eurocentric in emphasis, with especially weak representation in Africa and South-East Asia. To expand, the WVS adopted a strongly decentralised structure. Suitable academic representatives from new countries were free to join in a quasi-democratic network. Joining meant that new representatives had to conduct the predefined survey in their own country with at least 1,000 interviewees. They could then exchange their data with the WVS in return for the data from the rest of the project. Funding was primarily local, with representatives in each country funding their own part of the project. In this way the WVS grew out of its eurocentric origins to embrace 42 countries in the 2nd wave, 54 in the 3rd wave, and 62 in the 4th wave.

Today the database of the WVS has been published on the internet with free access. The Secretariat of the WVS is based in Sweden.

The official archive of the World Values Survey is located in [ASEP/JDS] (Madrid), Spain.

Methodology and scope

The WVS methodology consists of the administration of detailed questionnaires in face-to-face interviews. The questionnaires from all five waves (including the incomplete 2005/2006 wave) can be viewed in full on the WVS website. The questionnaires from the most recent waves have consisted of about 250 questions. In each country the questionnaires are administered to about 1,000 to 3,500 interviewees, with an average in the 4th wave of about 1,330 interviews per country and a worldwide total of about 92,000 interviews.

It has to be kept in mind that the sampling methods used in the country survey are not identical. As a result the Slovenian social scientist Adam hints to considerable differences between the results of the European Value Study 2001, which aggregates the European country studies of the World Values Survey, and the European Social Survey 2002/2003.

Results

A recreation of the Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map of the World, created by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel based on the World Values Survey.

The WVS questionnaire consists of about 250 questions resulting in some 400 to 800 measurable variables. A few examples are as follows:

• Happiness. Perceptions of happiness were measured and this part of the WVS is that most widely quoted by the press. The popular statistics website Nationmaster publishes a simplified world happiness scale derived from the WVS data. The WVS website allows a more sophisticated level of analysis than Nationmaster, such as comparison of happiness over time or across socio-economic groups. One of the most striking shifts in happiness measured by the WVS was the substantial drop in happiness of Russians and some other Eastern European countries during the 1990s.

• The Inglehart–Welzel Map is another of the most well-known results of the WVS survey. A number of variables were condensed into two dimensions of cultural variation (known as "traditional v. secular-rational" and "survival v. self-expression"), and on this basis the world's countries could be mapped into specific cultural regions. As Inglehart and Welzel point out, "These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators".

• The survey found that trust and democracy were values that crossed most cultural boundaries. The survey also showed that sex equality was one of the most significant differences between Western and other cultures.

See also

• Eurobarometer
• International Social Survey Programme
• Post-materialism
• Self-expression values
• Gross national happiness

Further reading

• Ronald Inglehart and Wayne Baker (2000). "Modernization, Cultural Change and the Persistence of Traditional Values" (PDF). American Sociological Review. 65 (1). American Sociological Review, Vol. 65, No. 1: 19–51. doi:10.2307/2657288. JSTOR 2657288.
• Christian Welzel, Ronald Inglehart & Hans-Dieter Klingemann (2003). "The Theory of Human Development: A Cross-Cultural Analysis." European Journal of Political Research 42(3): 341–79 ([1])

External links

• World Values Survey web site
• Asabiyya: Re-Interpreting Value Change in Globalized Societies
• Why Europe has to offer a better deal towards its Muslim communities. A quantitative analysis of open international data