Ronald Inglehart argues that economic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and even, to some extent, predictable patterns. This is a controversial claim. It implies that some trajectories of socioeconomic change are more likely than others--and consequently that certain changes are foreseeable. Once a society has embarked on industrialization, for example, a whole syndrome of related changes, from mass mobilization to diminishing differences in gender roles, is likely to appear. These changes in worldviews seem to reflect changes in the economic and political environment, but they take place with a generational time lag and have considerable autonomy and momentum of their own. But industrialization is not the end of history. Advanced industrial society leads to a basic shift in values, de-emphasizing the instrumental rationality that characterized industrial society. Postmodern values then bring new societal changes, including democratic political institutions and the decline of state socialist regimes. To demonstrate the powerful links between belief systems and political and socioeconomic variables, this book draws on a unique database, the World Values Surveys. This database covers a broader range than ever before available for looking at the impact of mass publics on political and social life. It provides information from societies representing 70 percent of the world's population--from societies with per capita incomes as low as $300 per year to those with per capita incomes one hundred times greater and from long-established democracies with market economies to authoritarian states.

Ronald Inglehart is the Lowenstein Professor of Political Science and a research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He is also co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. Inglehart helped found the Euro-Barometer surveys and directs the World Values Survey, which has surveyed representative national samples of the publics of 97 countries containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population. His research deals with changing belief systems and their impact on social and political change.

He has been a visiting professor or visiting scholar in France, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Nigeria and New Zealand, and has served as a consultant to the U.S. State Department and the European Union. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Social and Political Science and has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and will receive an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels in May 2010.

Education

University of Chicago, Ph.D.

University of Chicago, M.A.

Northwestern University, B.A.