The latest results of the World Values Survey (WVS) have recently been published. Covering the period from 2017 to 2022, the survey (which started in 1981) is based on interviews with almost 130000 persons in 90 countries. As stated on the WVS’s website, it “seeks to help scientists and policy makers understand changes in the beliefs, values and motivations of people throughout the world.” Questions consist for instance in asking people the relative importance for them of institutions or values like family and friendship, about the importance of god in their life, or whether they would sign a petition.
Based on the results of the survey, political scientists Ron Inglehart and Christian Welzel have argued that most cross-cultural variations in the world can be captured along two dimensions. The first dimension opposes traditional and secular values. The former emphasize “the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values,” while societies endorsing the latter “place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority.” The traditional/secular axis also determines views about the acceptability of abortion, suicide, euthanasia, and divorce. The second dimension corresponds to a survival/self-expression axis. Societies endorsing survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. Self-expression values give great significance to individual autonomy and individuality. Survival values tend to be associated with ethnocentric views with low levels of trust and tolerance, while self-expression values ascribe more importance to the preservation of the environment, the rights of minorities, and participation in decision-making in political life.
The results of the 2017-2022 survey are well represented by the map below:
The survey permits the identification of clusters of countries along the aforementioned axis. Visually, there seems to be an association between traditional and survival values on the one hand, and secular and self-expression values on the other hand. Countries belonging to the latter association roughly correspond to liberal democratic societies, while those closer to the former are for many of them ruled by authoritarian regimes. The actual picture is however more complex than that.
It is first interesting to adopt a dynamic perspective. It appears then that the convergence of societies toward one of the two associations of values is fairly recent. Looking at the map resulting from the 2002-2007 for instance gives a quite different picture:
In a recent article commenting on the results of the survey, The Economist makes it clear that the correlation between the values of the two axes is something new:
This change is the result of at least two combined tendencies. The first is that countries that we tend to associate with liberal democracies (English-speaking, Catholic Europe, Protestant Europe clusters) have tended to become over the last two decades more secular and foremost more individualist. In the meantime, countries belonging to other clusters have not seen a significant change in their values. An exception, and this is the second tendency, is constituted by the countries belonging to the Orthodox cluster. Comparing the 2023 and 2008 maps, we can see that they have tended to become less secular while remaining dominated by survival values. The result is a kind of worldwide polarization along two sets of values on which several authoritarian leaders have recently played to denounce the imperialism of Western societies and their so-called universal values. This goes against the naïve historicist view that societies must converge toward the same set of values as they become richer. As another article by The Economist notes, that does not mean that authoritarians are right. What maintains societies in the survival/traditional corner is fear: fear of others, fear of what will happen tomorrow. Interpersonal trust, tolerance, open-mindedness, and endorsement of diversity, all are attributes that are strongly associated with the general confidence that people have in their institutions, especially the state, and the general belief that they work to the advantage of everyone. In turn, these attributes favor risk-taking, innovation, and experiments, all of which contribute to increasing material wealth and human flourishing. Only an implausible form of relativism can convince one that there is no progress moving from the bottom-left to the upper-right corner of the map.
Two additional observations to conclude. First, a limitation of the WVS is obviously that it is highly aggregated. As a result, it fails to capture within-country heterogeneity. The authors of the WVS do note that values also differ within societies but observe that the variation is 5 to 10 times less than between societies. Nonetheless, one may suspect that the political polarization that we can observe in many Western societies is tightly related to a similar value polarization to the one we measure worldwide. It may be, as the survey suggests, that self-expression values have significantly progressed on average in liberal democracies. But this may hide the fact that populations within liberal democracies are increasingly disagreeing about those values. By the way, the rise of populism in wealthy Western countries is based on the same mechanism as authoritarianism worldwide: fear. Populists in Western countries capitalize on the fact that a significant part of the population feels vulnerable, and this feeling of vulnerability may be partially grounded in the cultural evolution that affects those societies.
My second observation is more theoretical. Liberal theory has been largely guided over the last two or three decades by the idea that liberalism is “political”, not “comprehensive”, to use John Rawls’s wording. The results of the WVS show that we should consider this idea with caution. It is true – it was Rawls’s main point – that contemporary liberal societies are so diverse that any hope of founding justice principles or the legitimacy of the state on specific values and moral beliefs is doomed from the start. On the other hand, even though a liberal society can and must give the opportunity to people who endorse traditional values to live according to them, it cannot be based overall on these values. Whether we like it or not, a liberal society is one where religion does not have the public importance it has in more traditional societies, where family, while still an important institution, is nonetheless not necessarily no longer the one that matters the most in terms of value transmission, and so on. It is just not true that all ways of life and all values can flourish equally in a liberal society. A liberal society, and as a result a liberal state, cannot be fully value-neutral.