Ronald Inglehart

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Ronald F. Inglehart (born September 5, 1934 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is a political scientist at the University of Michigan. He is director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 80 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 85 percent of the world's population.

In The Silent Revolution (1977) Inglehart discovered a major intergenerational shift in the values of the populations of advanced industrial societies. In his 1989 book Inglehart uses a large body of time-series survey data from twenty-six nations gathered from 1970 through 1988 to analyze the cultural changes that are occurring as younger generations gradually replace older ones in the adult population. These changes have far-reaching political implications, and they seem to be transforming the economic growth rates of societies and the kind of economic development that is pursued. Economic, technological, and sociopolitical changes have been changing the cultures of advanced industrial societies during the past several decades. Inglehart examines changes in religious beliefs, work motivation, political conflict, attitudes toward children and families, and attitudes toward divorce, abortion, and homosexuality.

In 1997 Inglehart argued that economic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and, to some extent, predictable patterns. Inglehart theorised that industrialization leads to related changes such as mass mobilization and diminishing differences in gender roles. Changes in worldviews seem to reflect changes in the economic and political environment, but take place with a generational time lag.

Following industrialization, advanced industrial society leads to a basic shift in values, de-emphasizing instrumental rationality. Postmodern values then bring new societal changes, including democratic political institutions and the decline of state socialist regimes.

Inglehart's 2004 book with Pippa Norris, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide reexamines the secularization thesis. Many nineteenth-century thinkers -- Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud -- predicted that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the emergence of industrial society. This belief that religion was dying became the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century.

During the last decade, however, the secularization thesis has experienced sustained challenge. Critics point to multiple indicators of religious health and vitality today, from the continued popularity of churchgoing in the United States, to the emergence of New Age spirituality in Western Europe, the surge of fundamentalist movements and Islamic parties in the Muslim world, the evangelical revival sweeping through Latin America, and the widespread ethno-religious conflicts in international affairs.

The traditional secularization thesis needs updating: religion has not disappeared and appears unlikely to do so. Yet the concept of secularization arguably captures an important part of what is going on. Sacred and Secular develops a theory of secularization and existential security, building on key elements of traditional sociological theories and revising others. This book demonstrates that: (1) The publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past fifty years; but (2) The world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before -- and they constitute a growing proportion of the world's population. Though these two propositions may seem contradictory, they are not. The fact that the first proposition is true, helps account for the second — because secularization has a surprisingly powerful negative impact on human fertility rates.

This book draws on a massive base of new evidence generated by the four waves of the World Values Survey executed from 1981 to 2001 in eighty societies, covering all of the world’s major faiths. Examining religiosity from a broader perspective and in a wider range of countries than ever before, this book demonstrates that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially those in poorer nations and in failed states, facing personal survival-threatening risks. Exposure to physical, societal and personal risks drives religiosity. Conversely, a systematic erosion of traditional religious practices, values and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations. But at the same time, a growing proportion of the population-- in both rich and poor countries-- spends time thinking about the meaning and purpose of life. In developed countries, the established churches are losing their ability to tell people how to live their lives, but spiritual concerns, broadly defined, are becoming increasingly important.

Further information is available at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/

[edit] Bibliography

Inglehart has written more than 200 publications, including:

The Silent Revolution, Princeton University Press, 1977.
Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, Princeton University Press, 1990.
1995. Value Change in Global Perspective, University of Michigan Press (with Paul R. Abramson)
Modernization and Postmodernization, Princeton University Press, 1997.
(with Wayne Baker) “Modernization, Cultural Change and the Persistence of Traditional Values.” American Sociological Review. (February, 2000).
Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World, Cambridge University Press, 2003) (co-authored with Pippa Norris).
Human Beliefs and Values: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook based on the 1999-2002 values Surveys. (co-edited with Miguel Basanez, Jaime Deiz-Medrano, Loek Halman and Ruud Luijkx). Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2004.
Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge University Press, 2004 (co-authored with Pippa Norris).
Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (co-authored with Christian Welzel).