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Explaining politics: An empirical test of competing value measures
Author(s) -
ROSSTEUTSCHER SIGRID
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/j.0304-4130.2004.00174.x
Subject(s) - positive economics , politics , value (mathematics) , world values survey , test (biology) , function (biology) , sociology , econometrics , economics , social psychology , political science , psychology , law , statistics , mathematics , paleontology , evolutionary biology , biology
. Values have long played a major role both in the analysis of political culture and as an explanatory concept relating to human attitudes and action: in fact, their scientific significance depends crucially on their explanatory function. After more than three decades of debate about the rise of postmaterialism and Inglehart's particular value measure, this rationale appears at times to be lost. This article examines the crucial issue of value's potential to explain political phenomena. How much can the postmaterialism‐materialism instrument explain? Are there alternative operationalisations of values that have greater utility? The empirical analysis, based upon a representative survey conducted in Germany in 1992, leads to the surprisingly unambiguous result that among different value measures, Inglehart's variant explains the least.