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MODERNIZATION, CULTURAL CHANGE,
AND THE PERSISTENCE OF TRADITIONAL VALUES*
Modernization theorists from Karl Marx to Daniel Bell have argued that economic development brings pervasive cultural changes. But others, from Max Weber to Samuel Huntington, have claimed that cultural values are an enduring and autonomous influence on society. We test the thesis that economic development is linked with systematic changes in basic values. Using data from the three waves of the World Values Surveys, which include 65 societies and 75 percent of the world's population, we find evidence of both massive cultural change and the persistence of distinctive cultural traditions. Economic development is associated with shifts away from absolute norms and values toward values that are increasingly rational, tolerant, trusting, and participatory. Cultural change, however is path dependent. The broad cultural heritage of a society-Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Confucian, or Communist-leaves an imprint on values that endures despite modernization. Moreover, the differences between the values held by members of different religions within given societies are much smaller than are cross-national differences. Once established, such cross-cultural differences become part of a national culture transmitted by educational institutions and mass media. We conclude with some proposed revisions of modernization theory.
The last decades of the twentieth century were not kind to modernization theory, once widely considered a powerful tool for peering into the future of industrial society. Modernization theory's most influential proponent, Karl Marx, claimed that economically developed societies show the future to less developed societies (Marx 1973). His prophecies have had enormous impact, but as the twenty-first century begins, few people anticipate a proletarian revolution or trust a state-run economy. Furthermore, although theorists from Marx to Nietzsche to Lerner to Bell predicted the decline of religion in the wake of modernization, religion and spiritual beliefs have not faded. Instead, social and political debate about religious and emotionally charged issues such as abortion and euthanasia have grown increasingly salient (DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson 1996; Hunter 1991; Williams 1997), and a resurgence of fundamentalist Islam has established a major cleavage in international politics.
Well into the twentieth century, modernization was widely viewed as a uniquely Western process that non-Western societies could follow only in so far as they abandoned their traditional cultures and assimilated technologically and morally...