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This study compares civilian post-materialism levels of 10 advanced countries by examining the effects of welfare characteristics and individual security on post-materialistic values. The results indicate that individuals' post-materialistic values are more staunchly determined by characteristics of their countries' welfare and level of individual security than economic levels of individuals and nations. Moreover, this study finds that the type of welfare system and the level of welfare provision of a particular country have a significant relationship with insecure life event experiences and a sense of insecurity among individual civilians. Overall, research results show that, as for the countries having reached a certain level of economic development, the issue at stake is not the height of national economic development, but the amount of the nation's economic resources needed to help secure the lives of its people. The research also shows that the security of life by welfare provisions lays the groundwork for the pursuit of post-materialistic values.
Keywords: post-materialism, welfare, welfare regime, insecurity, World Values Survey
Introduction
Human beings are thought to have different levels of needs starting from the most basic level, survival, to the highest level, self-actualization. Maslow elaborated this idea in his hierarchy of needs (Maslow 1943; Belk 1985). Although Maslow's theory was originally developed to explain human development at an individual level, U.S. political scientist, Ronald Inglehart, applied this idea to societies and examined the relationship between socioeconomic developments of societies and their cultural values. According to Inglehart's developmental stage theory, people living in countries that have achieved economic development are likely to pursue post-materialistic values that emphasize self-expression, subjective well-being, and quality of life in contrast to materialistic values that regard economic and physical security as the highest value (Inglehart 2005).
Inglehart's theory seems to work for many countries with different levels of socioeconomic status, but there are still significant variations in terms of post-materialism, even among relatively affluent countries. For example, South Korea's economic level ranked 12th in 2005 and 14th in 2013 by GDP (Gross Domestic Product) standards (World Bank 2014), but its level of postmaterialism is lower than the world average. According to the 2005 World Values Survey, South Korea's post-materialism rate (i.e., the percentage of post-materialists in the population) was 3.9%, which was 10~15% points lower...