The World Values Survey (WVS) is a global research project that explores people's values and beliefs, how they change over time, and what social and political impact they have. Since 1981 a worldwide network of social scientists have conducted representative national surveys as part of WVS in almost 100 countries.
The WVS measures, monitors and analyzes: support for democracy, tolerance of foreigners and ethnic minorities, support for gender equality, the role of religion and changing levels of religiosity, the impact of globalization, attitudes toward the environment, work, family, politics, national identity, culture, diversity, insecurity, and subjective well-being.
Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy and the tenth President of the European Commission, said about WVS work:
The growing globalization of the world makes it increasingly important to understand ... diversity. People with varying beliefs and values can live together and work together productively, but for this to happen it is crucial to understand and appreciate their distinctive worldviews.
Insights The WVS has over the years demonstrated that people's beliefs play a key role in economic development, the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions, the rise of gender equality, and the extent to which societies have effective government.
Inglehart–Welzel cultural map
Analysis of WVS data made by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel asserts that there are two major dimensions of cross cultural variation in the world: Traditional values versus secular-rational values and Survival values versus self-expression values. The global cultural map shows how scores of societies are located on these two dimensions. Moving upward on this map reflects the shift from Traditional values to Secular-rational and moving rightward reflects the shift from Survival values to Self-expression values.
Traditional values emphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.
Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. These societies place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable.
Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. It is linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.
Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life.
Christian Welzel introduced the concepts of emancipative values and secular values. He provided measurements for those values using World Values Survey data. Emancipative values are an updated version of self-expression values. Secular values are an updated version of traditional versus secular rational values. The survival versus self-expression values and the traditional versus secular rational values were factors extracted with an orthogonal technique of factor analysis, which forbids the two scales from correlating with each other. The emancipative and secular values are measured in such a way as to represent the data as faithfully as possible even if this results in a correlation between the scales. The secular and emancipative values indices are positively correlated with each other.
Culture variations A somewhat simplified analysis is that following an increase in standards of living, and a transit from development country via industrialization to post-industrial knowledge society, a country tends to move diagonally in the direction from lower-left corner (poor) to upper-right corner (rich), indicating a transit in both dimensions.
However, the attitudes among the population are also highly correlated with the philosophical, political and religious ideas that have been dominating in the country. Secular-rational values and materialism were formulated by philosophers and the left-wing politics side in the French Revolution, and can consequently be observed especially in countries with a long history of social democratic or socialistic policy, and in countries where a large portion of the population have studied philosophy and science at universities. Survival values are characteristic for eastern-world countries and self-expression values for western-world countries. In a liberal post-industrial economy, an increasing share of the population has grown up taking survival and freedom of thought for granted, resulting in that self-expression is highly valued.
Examples Societies that have high scores in Traditional and Survival values: Zimbabwe, Morocco, Jordan, Bangladesh. Societies with high scores in Traditional and Self-expression values: Most of Latin America, Ireland. Societies with high scores in Secular-rational and Survival values: Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Estonia. Societies with high scores in Secular-rational and Self-expression values: Japan, Nordic countries, Benelux, Germany, Switzerland, Czechia, Slovenia, France.
Gender values Findings from the WVS indicate that support for gender equality is not just a consequence of democratization. It is part of a broader cultural change that is transforming industrialized societies with mass demands for increasingly democratic institutions. Although a majority of the world's population still believes that men make better political leaders than women, this view is fading in advanced industrialized societies, and also among young people in less prosperous countries.
World Values Survey data is used by the United Nation Development Programme in order to calculate the gender social norms index. The index measures attitudes toward gender equality worldwide and was introduced in the Human Development Report starting from 2019. The index has four components, measuring gender attitudes in politics, education and economy as well as social norms related to domestic violence.United Nations Development Programme. 2020 Human Development Perspectives. Tackling social norms: A game changer for gender inequalities. Pages 6-8.
Religion The data from the World Values Survey cover several important aspects of people's religious orientation. One of them tracks how involved people are in religious services and how much importance they attach to their religious beliefs. In the data from 2000, 98% of the public in Indonesia said that religion was very important in their lives while in China only three percent considered religion very important. Another aspect concerns people's attitudes towards the relation between religion and politics and whether they approve of religious spokesmen who try to influence government decisions and people's voting preferences.
Happiness and life satisfaction The WVS has shown that from 1981 to 2007 happiness rose in 45 of the 52 countries for which long-term data are available. Since 1981, economic development, democratization, and rising social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world, which supports the human development theory.
Findings Some of the survey's basic findings are: Much of the variation in human values between societies boils down to two broad dimensions: a first dimension of “traditional vs. secular-rational values” and a second dimension of “survival vs. self-expression values.” On the first dimension, traditional values emphasize religiosity, national pride, respect for authority, obedience and marriage. Secular-rational values emphasize the opposite on each of these accounts. On the second dimension, survival values involve a priority of security over liberty, non-acceptance of homosexuality, abstinence from political action, distrust in outsiders and a weak sense of happiness. Self-expression values imply the opposite on all these accounts. Following the 'revised theory of modernization,' values change in predictable ways with certain aspects of modernity. People's priorities shift from traditional to secular-rational values as their sense of existential security increases (or backwards from secular-rational values to traditional values as their sense of existential security decreases). The largest increase in existential security occurs with the transition from agrarian to industrial societies. Consequently, the largest shift from traditional towards secular-rational values happens in this phase. People's priorities shift from survival to self-expression values as their sense of individual agency increases (or backwards from self-expression values to survival as the sense of individual agency decreases). The largest increase in individual agency occurs with the transition from industrial to knowledge societies. Consequently, the largest shift from survival to self-expression values happens in this phase. The value differences between societies around the world show a pronounced culture zone pattern. The strongest emphasis on traditional values and survival values is found in the Islamic societies of the Middle East. By contrast, the strongest emphasis on secular-rational values and self-expression values is found in the Protestant societies of Northern Europe. These culture zone differences reflect different historical pathways of how entire groups of societies entered modernity. These pathways account for people's different senses of existential security and individual agency, which in turn account for their different emphases on secular-rational values and self-expression values. Values also differ within societies along such cleavage lines as gender, generation, ethnicity, religious denomination, education, income and so forth. Generally speaking, groups whose living conditions provide people with a stronger sense of existential security and individual agency nurture a stronger emphasis on secular-rational values and self-expression values. However, the within-societal differences in people's values are dwarfed by a factor five to ten by the between-societal differences. On a global scale, basic living conditions differ still much more between than within societies, and so do the experiences of existential security and individual agency that shape people's values. A specific subset of self-expression values—emancipative values—combines an emphasis on freedom of choice and equality of opportunities. Emancipative values, thus, involve priorities for lifestyle liberty, gender equality, personal autonomy and the voice of the people. Emancipative values constitute the key cultural component of a broader process of human empowerment. Once set in motion, this process empowers people to exercise freedoms in their course of actions. If set in motion, human empowerment advances on three levels. On the socio-economic level, human empowerment advances as growing action resources increase people's capabilities to exercise freedoms. On the socio-cultural level, human empowerment advances as rising emancipative values increase people's aspirations to exercise freedoms. On the legal-institutional level, human empowerment advances as widened democratic rights increase people's entitlements to exercise freedoms. Human empowerment is an entity of empowering capabilities, aspirations, and entitlements. As an entity, human empowerment tends to advance in virtuous spirals or to recede in vicious spirals on each of its three levels.