Hofstede, Inglehart and beyond. New directions in empirical global value research

However much we appreciate the enormous scientific contribution by Professor Ronald Inglehart, who initiated the international data collection of the World Values Survey, our re-analysis of the very World Values Survey data [“roll-outs” of the World Values Survey data wvs1981_2008_v20090914.sav] brought us to question Inglehart’s theories, with which he and his associates interpret the mass of the World Values Survey data. Their theoretical approach does not use a sufficiently number of hard-core indicators how global publics view central issues of economic policy, and their theories overemphasize a secularistic view of the religious phenomenon in modern society. Their theories predict the gradual waning of the religious phenomena in parallel with the increase of human security, and even cherish at times the tendencies brought about by such a waning of the religious element in advanced democracies. Inglehart spells them out: higher levels of tolerance for abortion, divorce, homosexuality; the erosion of parental authority, the decrease of the importance of family life et cetera. Is that really something to cherish? Today, societal and economic development is discontinuous; regional centers of the world economy shift at an enormous speed; and above all, religion and family values can be an important assett in the stability of capitalist development. Economic growth inexorably shifts away from the North Atlantic arena towards new centers of gravitation of the world economy. Alberto Alesina’s and Paola Giuliano’s new maps of global values (Alesina and Giuliano, 2013) present a real break with the hitherto existing secularistic consensus of global value research. Their maps of family ties, respect for parents et cetera coincide with the global map of economic growth today. Leading representatives of the global economics profession now start to take up the challenge to interpret the mass of the data from the World Values Survey project on their own. The essay by Barro and McCleary (2003) was an important beginning and a good example of how today economic research uses data from the World Values Survey project to study the relationship between religion, denominations and economic growth. Alesina (2013); Alesina and Angeletos (2005); Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln (2007); Alesina and Guiliano (2010, 2011, 2013); Alesina, Cozzi and Mantovan (2012); and Alesina, di Tella, and MacCulloch (2004) all show how the economic discipline can gain hard-core, quantitative and valuable insights from comparative knowledge about such phenomena as generalized trust and social capital, individualism, family ties, morality, attitudes toward work and perception of poverty, and religious practice for economic processes. In our re-analysis, we use the advanced statistical multivariate analysis technique of the Promax factor analysis, which allows for correlations between factors. It is available to the global public via the IBM-SPSS statistical package XXI. We eliminated missing values by listwise delition. In our first re-analysis, there were 92289 interview partners from around the globe with complete data for all the 30 variables of our research design. Our main model explains 47.89% of the total variance of all the 30 variables. We highlight the relationships between the original 30 variables and the newly derived factor analytical dimensions: a) economic permissiveness b) traditional religion c) racism d) higher education for the younger generation (education gap between the generations) e) distrust of the army and the press f) authoritarian character g) tolerance and respect h) the 'ego' company (i. e. the rejection of obedience and unselfishness as values in education) i) [predominantly] female rejection of the market economy and democracy We also look at the trajectory of global society by analyzing the factor scores along the path of the Human Development Indicator of the UNDP (“human security indicator”, also used by Inglehart and his associates).  Economic permissiveness clearly captures the dimension of lawlessness, moral-ethical decay and the shadow economy, so prominent in contemporary economic theory of growth. In statistical terms, it is the most important of all the resulting factors.  Traditional religion is linked in a very complex way to the absence of economic permissiveness. We also look at the exceptional performers (“residuals”) which best avoided economic permissiveness on each stage of secularization. We also present Chropleth maps of human values across the globe, and show the regional implications of our analysis. Our global value development index combines law-abiding and social capital, avoiding racism; trust of the army and the press; no authoritarian character; a high degree of tolerance and respect + post-materialism; and a female acceptance of the market economy and democracy. The weight, given to each factor, corresponds to the Eigen values listed in this work. Our country results show that the five best ranked countries of our entire globe are all western democracies with a solid historical anchoring of their societies in the traditions of the Enlightenment – Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia. But we already find among the next five countries Canada, the two developing countries Vietnam and Tanzania, and the EU-member countries Italy (predominantly Roman Catholic, with a long history of liberal Catholicism since the Second Vatican Council) and Finland (predominantly Protestant). Our global value development index ranks the predominantly Muslim nation of Morocco twelfth – just behind the United States of America – and still ahead the Latin American democracy Uruguay and the EU-country Germany, to be followed by Bosnia and Indonesia. While in general terms our analysis is quite optimistic about the civil society foundations for a stable democracy for several Muslim countries, including Morocco, Bosnia, Indonesia, Turkey and Jordan, our analysis is fairly pessimistic for the former communist countries and successor states of the former Soviet Union, predominantly Muslim and non-Muslim alike. In a second factor analysis, we re-analyze the question of Islam and feminism, based on an analysis of all respondents from the World Values Survey. The Muslim population covered in this survey comprises representatives of 62.6% of the Muslim population of our globe. The data were based on the following variables: * Age * Education level (recoded) * Highest educational level attained * How important is God in your life * How often do you attend religious services (never?) * Important child qualities: religious faith * Jobs scarce: Men should have more right to a job than women (reject) * Sex (Gender) * University is more important for a boy than for a girl (reject) * Acceptancy of woman as a single parent The respondents (all denominations) comprised n = 173231 representative global citizens in 83 countries and territories. After Promax factor analysis, three factors explained 53.8% of total variance. While the distance to religious practice is explained to some 4% by the education level (correlation between the two factors is 0.192), one can say with certainty that there is no real sharp contradiction between religion and feminism on a global scale. And while gender determines feminist convictions, contained in our analysis to some 40%, it is also evident that feminist convictions are not only held by women, but also increasingly by enlightened men, non-Muslims and Muslims alike. Interestingly enough, our data also show that people supporting typical feminist contentions, like female access to tertiary education and jobs even at a time of crisis (Factor 3), are not necessarily too strongly in support of the acceptancy of women as a single parent (factor loading 0.352, i. e. only 12.39% of variance explained). Single parenthood is a form of household organization very common now in Western countries: the argument is that marriage is an outdated institution et cetera. Support for single parenthood by women is rather an expression of the distance towards religion around the globe (factor loading of 0.431, i. e. 18.58% of variance explained). Data emerging from the World Values Survey in the first decade of the 2000s also seem to suggest that the precariousness, which more and more characterizes the economies of leading Western countries leads toward an implosion of what Inglehart and his sociological school of thought interpreted as “self-expression values”. Our analysis of the time series element in the World Values Survey data shows that indeed, global value change seems to correspond to various ups and downs. To this end, we calculated which countries – in descending order – had very high increases or decreases in non-traditional values over preceding World Values Survey surveys from the original WVS website Inglehart’s own data (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/article_base_54). The very idea that self-expression values in the West are imploding, while in other regions of the world they are rising, is a challenge to existing value theories. The world, described by Inglehart and Baker, 2000, where in advanced industrial societies people pay large sums of money and travel long distances to experience exotic cultures no longer seems to exist for the “1.000 Euro” generation born after 1975, which experiences more and more job insecurity and hardly finds full-time tenured work opportunities, let alone the financial means to travel to long-distant countries. No wonder then that “self-expression” is dramatically declining in the West. We also highlight the fact that the latest wave of World Values Survey data, wave 6, from 2010 - 2014, released in May 2014 contains an item which directly asked 74,044 respondents in 52 countries whether they think that self-expression is an important value for child education. The correlation between these data and Inglehart’s self-express

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