World Cultural Map

[Kamala's side hoe]

I made a thread on the most recent version 2 years ago

Idk how many of you have heard of the World Values Survey or the World Cultural Map, but I thought I'd make a thread on this. It explains a lot of how divergent cultural values among societies affect their politics.

IMO it does a surprisingly good job explaining different cultural groups' affinities to certain politicians, political parties, policies, and perspectives on civic engagement.

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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. Some of the key findings of the work are described below.

Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map
The map presents empirical evidence of massive cultural change and the persistence of distinctive cultural traditions. Main thesis holds that socioeconomic development is linked with a broad syndrome of distinctive value orientations. 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:

1) Traditional values versus Secular-rational values and

2) Survival values versus 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. (Suicide is not necessarily more common.)
• 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.

The two dimensions have been created by running factor analysis over a set of ten indicators. The ten indicators used (five to tap each dimension) were chosen for technical reasons: in order to be able to compare findings across time, we used indicators that had been included in all four waves of the Values Surveys. These ten indicators reflect only a handful of the many beliefs and values that these two dimensions tap, and they are not necessarily the most sensitive indicators of these dimensions. They do a good job of tapping two extremely important dimensions of cross-cultural variation, but we should bear in mind that these specific items are only indicators of much broader underlying dimensions of cross-cultural variation [Source: Chapter 2 from Inglehart, R & C. Welzel. 2005. Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. New York: Cambridge University Press].

https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp?CMSID=Findings

According to the authors: "These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators—and each of these dimensions is strongly correlated with scores of other important orientations."[3]

The authors stress that socio-economic status is not the sole factor determining a country's location, as their religious and cultural historical heritage is also an important factor.[4]

Wave 7 (2017-2021)



I was surprised to see how much further down on the y-axis Mainland China is here, compared to previous versions. It seems pulled towards Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam relative to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, and Japan.

I also noticed that the US is much further left on the x-axis than in previous versions. Historically the US was further down on the y-axis than the rest of the Anglosphere (which checks out with anecdotal observations that the US is relatively religious and socially conservative). I wonder how much of this is due to rising income inequality, declining social mobility and trust, and secularization- all of which are correlated with the rise of Don Giovanni and his tenure in the White House.

India has also shifted considerably down and left- not sure how correlated this is with the rise of Modi's BJP if at all. It was solidly within the "Other Asia" cluster in the last version.

The cultural regions that are being suggested do actually exist IMO, they just heavily overlap with each other. If you were to draw blobs connecting all of the Confucian Asian societies, all of the Indianized Asian societies, and the combined blob of Sub-Saharan African + Muslim-majority societies, the intersection of those three blobs would contain Malaysia and Singapore. That isn't too far off from what you'd expect for former British colonies in Muslim-majority Island Southeast Asia that have experienced heavy Chinese immigration in the last 200-300 years.

[Kamala's side hoe]

    Thank you everyone, I will share some of my observations now. They tend to pertain mostly to cultures that I am more familiar with, but I try to cover a broad swathe.

• The anglosphere has secularized heavily in the past 20 years. The most traditional anglosphere country today is about equivalent to the most secular such country in 2004. Unfortunately Ireland seems to have dropped off the map, so it cannot be compared accurately.
• Some Orthodox countries have become much more traditional. Some have remained the same (e.g. Moldova, Greece, Romania). I don't notice any that have become markedly more secular.
• Poland was the most traditional ex-communist country in 2004, but now there are several more traditional.
• Greece has swung hard against self-expression. I am guessing that is related to the struggles of the Greek economy; probably shouldn't be a surprise that economic hardship induces a refocusing on survival.
• Likewise as Tim pointed out, Egypt is very curious. Like Greece it has moved hard towards survival, but it has also secularized appreciably at the same time. The combination strikes me as surprising, but I don't know enough about Egypt to comment further.
• A lot of African countries have swung hard towards survival. Obviously survival matters there due to the poverty of the region, but I wouldn't expect it to have worsened appreciably since 2004.
• Zimbabwe has secularized considerably, moving over a full point towards secularism and outstripping even the United States in this regard. South Africa too. I am guessing this is tied to anti-colonialism since Christianity was introduced there by European colonial powers, but I am not too knowledgeable about this topic.
• China has swung hard towards tradition, which is probably related to CCP propaganda promoting traditional Chinese culture as an ideal.
• Western/Northern Europe is sprinting towards the self-expression end of the spectrum. 2004 Sweden, which was the most pro-self-expression country then, would be 10th or so on the 2023 map.

I strongly suspect the x and y axes are normalized to whatever the average of all the data points is, so each country's/jurisdiction's position on the chart is relative to the average. Movement on the chart over time is likely relative to the average of all the countries, which means the addition of more countries in later versions of the survey makes objective comparisons per country across time difficult. I don't think NW Europe has shifted that hard towards self-expression so much as the average has shifted towards survival values as more countries from the Global South have been added to the survey.