Postmaterialist Liberty Aspirations

I’m spending a lot of time reading articles related to the World Values Survey, Postmaterialism and “Postmodernization” processes at present. The reason for this is that these studies are directly related to my ongoing project on emerging values in the Oresund region. Today I read an unusually interesting article by Christian Welzel and Ronald Inglehart, entitled “Liberalism, Postmaterialism, and the Growth of Freedom” (International Review of Sociology, 15: 81-108, 2005). In that article, they use a subset of the 12-item Postmaterialism Index that only includes those postmaterialist options that signal a prioritization of liberal democracy over other social objectives. The priorities in question are “freedom of speech,” “giving people more say in important government decisions,” and “giving people more say at their jobs and in their communities.”  Using regression analyses, Welzel and Inglehart show that this index is the best possible predictor of the direction of change over time in the index of civil and political liberties as measured by Freedom House, after controlling for per capita GDP (a significant variable) and a host of other variables that turned out to be insignificant when combined with the liberty aspiration index (i.e. income inequality, ethnic diversity, religious diversity, tolerance of out-groups, share of Protestants, and the level of political and civil liberties 10 years prior to the study period).

Interestingly, Taiwan is identified as an outlier. According to the results of both the 1994 and 2006 surveys, Taiwan’s population has the second-lowest (!) liberty aspirations in the world, after Pakistan. And I can personally attest from informal surveys of Taiwanese students that very few of them select “freedom of speech” as a priority, and many of them even indicate that there is too much freedom of speech in Taiwan. This is something that I find difficult to understand, given my values. Indeed, Taiwan has greater freedom of speech than almost any other Asian country, and is perhaps the main reason why I am prepared to live here. And though I like to complain about the two main Taiwanese parties (the KMT and the DPP), I have to grant them a greater concern with maintaining freedom of speech than is typical of the general population. I would guess that the Taiwanese anomaly is the result of two reinforcing factors: the need for American moral support and the fact that a majority of government ministers – in both KMT and DPP governments – were educated at American universities.

The other interesting observation is that the liberty aspiration of the American population declined substantially between 1999 and 2006. The only fully developed Western democracy that had lower liberty aspirations (in 1999) than the United States (in 2006) was Israel. In both cases, “strong defense forces” were prioritized over “giving people more say at work and in their communities.” War, in other words, seems especially destructive of the values that are the foundation for sustainable liberal democracy. In the American case, I also think that the Patriot Act and other assaults on the freedom of expression caused many of the less-informed citizens to waver in their support for free speech. In my view, the combined effects of an open-ended and ill-defined War on Terror and ever greater powers for the federal government to snoop on private written and spoken communications were the worst consequences of the Bush presidency, and the real reason why he was the worst president in American history. The economic mismanagement of the Bush administration was regrettable, but very similar to the ill-conceived plans of countless other governments, whether Democrat, Republican or European.

Anyway, here is a table with “liberty aspirations” around the world. The index ranges from 0 (no-one has any postmaterialist liberty aspirations) to 5 (everyone selects the options in a way that gives priority to liberty aspirations to the maximum extent possible). Highly developed and durable liberal democracies are in bold style:

Postmaterialist liberty aspirations index, 1999-2006

Country	Index
Andorra	3.047	Cyprus	1.628
Canada	2.939	Malaysia	1.627
Britain	2.889	Singapore	1.614
Netherlands	2.795	Turkey	1.611
Switzerland	2.795	Thailand	1.592
Sweden	2.760	Moldova	1.580
Finland	2.726	Kyrgyzstan	1.577
Puerto Rico	2.656	Uganda	1.562
USA 1999	2.623	Algeria	1.551
Germany	2.591	Ghana	1.540
Slovenia	2.584	Bangladesh	1.524
Italy	2.512	Ukraine	1.490
New Zealand	2.505	Serbia	1.482
Mexico	2.500	Vietnam	1.473
Australia	2.490	Bosnia	1.430
Dominican Republic	2.441	Burkina Faso	1.420
France	2.386	South Korea	1.395
Peru	2.350	India	1.377
Chile	2.211	Mali	1.321
Spain	2.187	Romania	1.252
Poland	2.170	Morocco	1.250
Japan	2.129	Bulgaria	1.242
Venezuela	2.127	Macedonia	1.233
Argentina	2.077	Indonesia	1.209
Brazil	2.073	Tanzania	1.186
USA 2006	2.022	Armenia	1.172
Trinidad	1.940	Georgia	1.169
Ethiopia	1.911	Russia	1.152
Rwanda	1.906	Egypt	1.128
South Africa	1.876	Jordan	1.078
Zambia	1.829	China	1.074
Israel	1.819	Albania	1.018
Philippines	1.754	Taiwan	.855
Nigeria	1.707	Pakistan	.807
Iran	1.649