Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
This article was inspired by an idea developed by Thorlief Pettersson. Fieldwork in the U.S. and several other countries was supported by the National Science Foundation.
A list of permanent links to supplementary materials provided by the authors precedes the references section.
Rich countries are much likelier to be democracies than poor countries. Why this is true is debated fiercely. Simply reaching a given level of economic development could not itself produce democracy; it can do so only by bringing changes in how people act. Accordingly, Seymour Martin Lipset argued that development leads to democracy because it produces certain socio-cultural changes that shape human actions.1 The empirical data that would be needed to test this claim did not exist at the time Lipset made this assertion. So, his suggestion remained a passing comment.2 Today, large-N comparative surveys make the relevant data available for most of the world's population, and there have been major advances in analytic techniques. But social scientists rarely put the two together, partly because of a persistent tendency to view mass attitudinal data as volatile and unreliable.
In this piece we wish to redress this situation. We argue that certain modernization-linked mass attitudes are stable attributes of given societies that are being measured reliably by the large-N comparative survey projects, even in low-income countries, and that these attitudes seem to play important roles in social changes such as democratization. Our purpose here is not to demonstrate the impact of changing values on democracy so much as to make a point about the epistemology of survey data with important ramifications for the way we analyze democracy. Unlike dozens of articles we have published that nail down one hypothesis about one dependent variable, this piece analyzes data from almost 400 surveys to demonstrate that modernization-linked attitudes are stable attributes of given societies and are strongly linked with many important societal-level variables, ranging from civil society to democracy to gender equality. Direct measures of these attitudes enable us to test arguments about the role of culture, such as Lipset's assumption that economic development leads to democracy by changing people's goals and behavior. In this regard, our argument is relevant to all scholars interested in explaining the sources...