Commentary On Inglehart’s"Post-materialist Values"

Ronald Inglehart is one of the most important promoters of the revival of political culture studies in the west since the1980s. Applying an empirical approach, which is the mainstream research approach in contemporary political culture studies, Inglehart is devoted to the empirical study of global value changes, establishing an integrated system of political culture. And the core of this system is ’postmaterial values’, a concept Inglehart has raised in the late1970s.Inglehart tries to make political culture get rid of the restriction of ideology or cultural traditions based on regional or cross sectional surveys. He intends to put political cultural system into the human development sequence. He assumes that culture change and economic and political progress are linked segments that form human development and emancipation. Being self-independent, political culture serves as an intermediate variable between economic development and political progress.Based on the scarcity hypothesis and the socialization hypothesis, Inglehart argues that as the marginal effect of economic development diminishes, great changes have occurred in western advanced industrial societies. A new pattern of value which Inglehart defines as ’post-materialism’ is replacing traditional value, bringing fundamental changes in people’s attitudes toward region, gender, sex etc. and actions as well as political ecology. Also, he argues that the post-materialist value change is not unique phenomenon in the west, but a universal phenomenon in societies experiencing modernization and post-modernization, whatever traditional cultural style they may have.In order to detect the above assumption, Inglehart presided the program of World Values Survey, to find evidences of value change and to predict the trend in a long period of time. The long-term tracking data and statistics help to prove the post-materialist value change do exist in wide areas, and help Inglehart to empirically analyse the reasons and the results of this change. It feeds back to economic development, and acts on the political institution. More important, it has strong correlation with democracy. As people put higher emphasis on autonomy and free choice, they will have more demands for political liberty, thus it will contribute to the establishment and maintenance of democratic institutions.Therefor, we can conclude that Inglehart also treat a westernized democracy concept as a universally adapted value all over the word, no matter what traditional cultural regions the society belongs.This article intends to present the structure of Inglehart’s post-materialist theory, his important viewpoints as well as the large and rigorous empirical data measurement, so as to draw some inspirations to China’s political study and the country construction. In addition, Inglehart’s analysis might have some constrains for dealing with China’s development, for Chinese values do show some different aspects with western cultures. With this concentration, this article tries to find more.