Assessing Long-Term Value Changes in Societies

Values in Public Opinion Research

Since the pioneering voter study The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944), social background variables like gender, age, education, and occupation have played a central role in survey analyses of political behavior. Subsequent electoral studies like The American Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960) used attitudes as important explanatory variables. More recently, Inglehart in The Silent Revolution (1977) explained the growth of new political movements and parties by changes in values. In the causal chain from social characteristics to behavior, values and attitudes have the role of intervening variables, with values as the prior variable and a possible cause of variation in attitudes.

The concept of values is used within several social science disciplines with varying content (Hitlin & Piliavin, 2004). An early definition often cited is the one by Kluckhohn (1951, p. 395): ‘A value is a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable, which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action.’ Rokeach, pioneering the use of values in survey research (1968), defined values as ‘enduring beliefs that a specific mode of conduct is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence’ (1973, p. 5). According to Schwartz (1992), values are cognitive representations of three universal human requirements: biologically based organism needs, social interactional [Page 557]requirements for interpersonal coordination, and social institutional demands for group welfare and survival.

Attitudes play a central role in studies of public opinion. The concept refers to favorable or unfavorable evaluations of an object (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). According to Rokeach (1970), an attitude is an organization of three different kinds of beliefs relating to an object: descriptive (regarding the actual properties of the object), prescriptive (regarding the ideal properties of such an object), and evaluative (positive, neutral or negative emotions, predisposing one for certain modes of action towards the object), resulting from how well the actual properties are experienced to correspond to the ideal ones.

Values are more abstract and general conceptions of ideals affecting prescriptive beliefs for a range of concrete objects. They are also considered more stable, developed during adolescence and remaining relatively unaltered during the rest of a person's life (Mannheim, 1952; Inglehart, 1977, 1990). This implies that aggregate value change will primarily be the result of generational replacement, and accordingly usually gradual and modest in size within short time spans. Attitudes are directly affected by the impact of new experiences and information on their descriptive component, and will therefore be more volatile and susceptible to short-term changes.

...