Discussants: Rosta Gergely (PPKE)
Abstract
An influential research paradigm going back to Ronald Inglehart's postmaterialism thesis and more recently expounded by Christian Welzel conceives of religion as part of a parochial worldview that also includes authoritarianism and thus inhibits human empowerment. Further, the thesis also claims that fading existential pressures drive societies toward a de-emphasis of materialism. Accordingly, measures produced by this school conflate certain aspects of authoritarianism with religiosity, and others with materialism, and describe the "rising force of emancipation" as going hand-in-hand with a retreat of these values.
This conflation follows from a substantialist paradigm, which also underlies much of mainstream value research. Stemming from Cartesian epistemology, mainstream value research consists, in effect, of inquiries into substances (represented by the variables) and their impacts on each other. Their divergences regarding the primacy of either the "material" or the "cultural" notwithstanding, these currents share in their advocacy of "noble" substances (e.g., "achievement motivation", "Confucian dynamism", "cool-water condition") as catalysts of outcomes that the investigator deems desirable. Inevitably, such a research strategy is conducive to "ranking" cultures. In contrast, relational sociology, the approach taken in this study does not ascribe substances to cultures, and regards the culture-economy dichotomy as empirically meaningless.
Challenging the Inglehart school, this empirical study looks at religiosity, authoritarianism, and materialism from a field analytical perspective, applying considerations that are common to all relational approaches. Most importantly, to unravel the structure of values, as well as their embeddedness in the social fabric, it shifts the focus from the variables to the units of observation by using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), a non-linear, geometric method. Building on previous work, I present an ecological analysis of recent data from the World Values Survey that contradicts the Inglehart school on several points. First, there is no evidence of a continued secularization trend: in most European nations, religiosity has not significantly declined beyond the early 1990s level. Second, there is indeed a general retreat of authoritarianism, but -- against the predictions of the postmaterialism thesis -- it often goes together with a surge in religiosity, and this trend is not restricted to East European publics where religion is also a carrier of national identity in the postcommunist context. Third, the clear-cut positive association posited between materialism and per capita GDP is not borne out by the data: above-average materialism is more typical of affluent societies than it is of nations with high poverty rates. Fourth, the distances between geopolitical clusters (or culture zones) in the space defined by these three values are significantly different from what follows from studies using linear measures, including the cultural maps produced by Inglehart and Welzel. Using the Hausdorff metric, a geometric measure of distance that takes into consideration the dispersion of the clusters, I find no convergence of East and West European nations between the early 1990s and the late 2000s.