The Problem with Inglehart’s Postmodernization Theory

To begin with, let me say that I find Ronald Inglehart’s theories very interesting and highly productive. I also admire his data-collecting effort, which has resulted in an unrivaled database of value survey results from almost 100 countries, including results from North America and Western Europe that can be traced back to 1970.

But I also have some problems with his theories and hypotheses. My main problem is that he uses the nation state as the unit of analysis. This leads to slightly absurd comparisons of Andorra (population: 80,000) and China (population: 1,300,000,000). Wouldn’t it be more logical to focus on functionally integrated urban and rural regions around the world? A lot of empirical studies have shown that large cosmopolitan cities tend to be more similar to one another than to lagging rural regions with the same national affiliation.

The focus on nation states seems to be a disciplinary pathology of political science, for obvious reasons. The other problem I have is his mostly unarticualted assumption that democracy works well in delivering what people want. Thus the greater current appreciation of market competition in Sweden than in other Western European countries allegedly reflects a Swedish welfare state that is slightly larger than optimal. Consequently, in most other countries governments must still be pursuing desirable public sector growth; the assumption is that people choose at the margin while results tend toward optimality in the long run. I do not share Inglehart’s faith. A good counterexample is when two democracies with similar value structures may evolve into societies with radically different levels of taxation and spending — because of different democratic rules of the game. I’m thinking of Sweden (a unitary representative democracy) and Switzerland (a constitutional federal republic with a mixture of representative and direct democracy).

Inglehart’s disregard of evolutionary political and market processes is also evident in his support of the popular secularization hypothesis: Europe is the normal case and North America is an aberration. This is contradicted by most empirical analyses that take political and economic institutions into account. Both continents are in fact normal cases: the reason for the much greater religious participation rates in the United States and Canada is a much more diverse supply of opportunities, which in turn is a reflection of the separation of church and state and a level playing field for religious entrepreneurs (since the 1776  revolution in the US case).

But perhaps it’s a reflection of Inglehart’s own ideological biases. I would be very surprised if he does not consider himself a liberal of either the egalitarian or technocratic variety and if he is in fact not either an agnostic or an atheist. But he always presents his theories as if they were value-neutral. I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of the possibility of value neutrality in social science. Perhaps Gunnar Myrdal (a democratic socialist) and Dan Klein (a libertarian) are right: it’s better to make one’s own ideological commitments explicit when presenting theories in any of the social sciences, including economics.

Why did I say that Swedes now appreciate market competition more than most? The following table is based on the World Values Survey results from 2006:

Question: How would you place your views on this scale? 1 means you agree completely with the statement on the left; 10 means you agree completely with the statement on the right; and if your views fall somewhere in between, you can choose any number in between. Sentences: Competition is good. It stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas vs Competition is harmful. It brings out the worst in people.

Country	Mean (1 = competition is good; 10 = competition is harmful)
India	2.8
New Zealand	3.3
Sweden	3.4
United States	3.5
China	3.5
Switzerland	3.6
Canada	3.8
Australia	3.8
Hong Kong	3.8
Taiwan	3.8
Germany	3.9
Korea	4.0
Britain	4.2
Spain	4.2
Japan	4.3
Italy	4.4
Netherlands	4.7
France	5.0

The French always tend to rank last in such rankings; so their relative skepticism about the virtues of competition does not surprise me in the least. But note that the French welfare state is as comprehensive as the Swedish one.