Hostname: page-component-68945f75b7-76l5x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-05T20:53:09.315Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Political Culture and qolitical Change in Western Europe and the USA: An American Perspective

Review products

InglehartRonald: The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics, Princeton University Press, 1977, xii + 482 pages. Cloth: A22.40, Paper: A7.40.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1978

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright ? Government and Opposition Ltd 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See, for example, Eulau, Heinz, ‘Skill Revolution and Consultative Common wealth’, American Political Science Review, LXVII, March, 1973, No. I, pp. 169-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huntington, Samuel P., ‘The Change to Change’, Comparative Politics, 3, No. 3, April, 1971, pp. 283-22CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lindberg, Leon N. (ed.), Politics and the Future of Industrial Society, McKay, New York, 1976.Google Scholar

2 These include Lindberg, op. cit., ch 3, Inglehart, Ronald, ‘The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies’, American Political Science Review, LXV, No. 4, December, 1971, pp. 991-1017;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Inglehart, Ronald, ‘Long-term Trends in Mass Support for European Unification’, Government and Opposition, 12, No. 2, Summer 1977, pp. 13-77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 The term ‘values’ is used in the sense of desired objects and not the criteria by which they are selected.

4 Maslow, Abraham T., Toward a Psychology of Being, D. Van Nostrand, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962 Google Scholar

5 These were originally referred to as ‘acquisitive’ and ‘post-bourgeois’ in his article ‘The Silent Revolution in Europe’, op. cit.

6 This resistance of older generations to changes in their environment has been called ‘political immunization’ by McPhee and Ferguson in their contribution to McPhee, William N. and Glaser, William A., Public Opinion and Congressional Elections, Free Press, New York, 1962, ch. 6.Google Scholar

7 Assuming that the differences are generational and not life-cycle in nature.

8 There is reason to believe that they are more important than the numbers alone would suggest, as is discussed later.

9 For strong and more direct supportive evidence on the generational nature of value shifts see Dalton, Russell J., ‘Was There a Revolution? A Note on Generational Versus Life Cycle Explanations of Value Differences’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4, January 1977, pp. 45-73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Dalton (op. cit.) goes on to argue that as Western Europe becomes increasingly ‘saturated’ by affluence, so the pace of generational shifts in values will slow down. Thus the future in which post-materialists dominate is for Dalton further off in time than Inglehart claims. See esp. pp. 468-70.

11 Inglehart has no data for party elites - a major gap for future research to fill. However, a survey of party officials in the USA in 1976, reported in Prewitt, Kenneth and Verba, Sidney, An Introduction to American Government, Revised 2nd ed., Harper and Row, New York, 1977. p. 233.Google Scholar and conducted by the Washington Post and the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, showed that for Republicans the top national priority was seen as ‘curbing inflation’, and for Democrats, ‘reducing unemployment’ with inflation second. Both are clearly materialist values.

l2 This is before the oil crisis triggered off unusually high levels of inflation.

l3 Marsh, Alan, ‘The “Silent Revolution” Value Priorities and the Quality of Life in Britain’, American Political Science Review, LXIX, No. I, March 1975. pp. 21-30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See also Inglehart, Ronald, ‘Values, Objective Needs and Subjective Satisfaction Among Western Publics’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4, January 1977, esp. PP. 447-55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

l5 See Alford, Robert, Party and Society, John Murray, Chicago, 1964, passim.Google Scholar

l6 This continuing, if modified, relevance of religious (‘non-materialist’?) values deserves much more attention than is given it by Inglehart. See also Wuthnow, Robert, The Consciousness Reformation, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 See Miller, Arthur H., ‘Political Issues and Trust in Government: rg64-1970’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII, No. 3, September 1976, pp. 753-78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 More recent data (1976)an alysed by Inglehart show that the trend seems to have reversed itself, a pattern which he finds ‘rather surprising’. However, he claims that, even in 1976, the levels of political satisfaction in Western Europe are low and that they were probably higher in the 1950s and early 1960s although there are no time-series data available to support the point, unlike the USA. See Ronald Inglehart ‘Political Dissatisfaction and Mass Support for Social Change in Advanced Industrial Society’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, October 1977, pp. 455-72.

l9 The political differences between different modes of participation are discussed in Verba, Sidney and Nie, Norman H., Participation in America, Harper and Row, New York; 1972, esp. ch. 3.Google Scholar

20 See Deutsch, Karl W., ‘Social Mobilization and Political Development’, American Political Science Review, LV, No. 2, September 1961, pp. 493-514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 This conclusion has been attacked in Thomas Herz, ‘Cognitive Mobilization and European Integration in France and Germany 1962-1973: Fact or Fiction’, ECPR Joint Sessions, London, 1975. Results favourable to Inglehart can be found in Wildgen, John K. and Feld, Werner J., ‘Evaluative and Cognitive Factors in the Prediction of European Unification’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, October 1976, pp. 309-34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Inglehart provides no direct evidence, such as content of analyses of politicians’ speeches or broadcasts, on this. Results from two reports by Werner J. Feld and John K. Wildgen of a 1973 survey of national politicians and civil servants are inconclusive. 66% of the former and 49% of the latter favoured political union, (N = 82 each) compared with 54% for EEC citizenry reported for the same year in Euro-barometre, NO. 4, December 1975, p. 65. Thepoliticians’ figure may be high because ofthe poor sampling procedures. Furthermore, only 19% of civil servants and 20% of politicians were willing to make a personal financial sacrifice for European union compared with 38% for the EEC mass population. See for the civil servants’ results, ‘National Administrative Elites and European Integration: Sabotage at Work?’, journal of Common Market Studies, 13, March 1975, pp. 24465, and for the politicians’ ‘Electoral Ambitions and European Integration’, International Organisation, 29, Spring 1975, PP. 447-68.

23 Cohort analysis along these lines has been thoroughly discussed in Philip E. Converse, The Dynamics of Party Support: Cohort-Analysing Party Identification, Sage, Beverly Hills, 1976.

24 See Dalton, op. cit., esp. pp. 461-2.

25 See Jennings, M. Kent, ‘The Variable Nature of Generational Conflict: Some Examples from West Germany’, Comparative Political Studies, 9, No. 2, July 1976, esp. pp. 172-80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Jennings, op. cit., p. 173.

27 A micro-level only design might bejustified on the grounds that the immediate determinants of value change are switches in psychological needs. However, his model (laid out on p. 5 ) certainly concerns system-level and individual-level phenomena. For illustrations of cross-level analyses, see Mattei Dogan and Stein Rokkan (eds), Quantitative Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences, M.I.T., 1969; see also Dalton, op. cit., p. 460.

28 In 1970-71 a, four-item measure was employed, this being extended to a twelve-item schedule in 1972-73. The data were then factor-analysed and the results validated using several other variables.

29 Unfortunately Inglehart does not supply sufficient information about his factor analysis in order to evaluate the results fully.

30 lnglehart does suggest that there may be technical reasons for ‘diminishing the amount of variance that can be explained by the first factor’, p. 43, fn. 17. However, this is ‘minor’ relative to what he sees as the ‘much stronger tendency’ of item clustering on the dimension.

31 These figures are not supplied in the book, but in his article in Lindberg, op. cit. the figure is .32 for the four-item measure. It is difficult to compare this with other results directly, because of differences in instrumentation, and the unknown statistic Inglehart used. For what it is worth, a figure of .38 is quoted for a range of political attitudes in the USA in 1972 by Nk, Norman H. and Anderson, Kristi in ‘Mass Belief Systems Revisited: Political Change and Attitudes Structure’, journal of Politics, 36, August 1974. p. 566.Google Scholar

32 John K. Wildgen and Werner J. Feld, ‘Evaluative and Cognitive Factors…’ op. rit.

33 Ibid., p. 317.

34 Ibid.

35 Furthermore, geo-political identity, like party identification, may come in more than one variety, for example, positive and negative. See Ian Budge, Ivor Crewe and Dennis Fairlie, Party Identification and Beyond, Wiley, 1976, esp. ch. 3.

36 A marvellous example of this is provided by Verba and Nie, op. cit.

37 SeeJennings, op. Lit., p. 176.

38 This i s not to say that the patterns are not consistent or real merely that they are rather weak. See also Wildgen and Feld, ‘Evaluative and Cognitive Factors …’, op. Lit., p. 318.

39 For example, nowhere is a path analysis of even the central concepts presented in which one can see the various linkages between the different aspects and background causes of the Silent Revolution.

40 A famous example being Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture, Princeton University Press, 1963.

41 See Kavanagh, Dennis, Political Culture, Macmillan, London 1972, ch. 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Inglehart is certainly aware of this. See, for example, pp. 261 and 28490.

43 See, for example, the remarks of Wildgen and Feld, ‘Evaluative and Cognitive Factors …’, op. cit., p. 3 I I and Russell Dalton, op. cit., p. 470.