Open AccessAre the values of the citizens of the former communist countries similar?
Author(s) -
Dragomir Pantic
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
zbornik matice srpske za društvene nauke/zbornik matice srpske za društvene nauke
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2406-0836
pISSN - 0352-5732
DOI - 10.2298/zmsdn0519049p
Subject(s) - population , communism , prosperity , globalization , geography , poverty , quarter (canadian coin) , value (mathematics) , china , sociology , political science , development economics , demography , statistics , politics , mathematics , law , economics , archaeology
Comparative research has been one of the basic tendencies characteristic for sociology and other social sciences in the last decades. The comparison of the values of the population from all continents is particularly important in the era of globalization; certainly the greatest contribution and the greatest endeavor so far in that respect has been The World Study of Values by R. Inglehardt and his collaborators. In the last quarter of the century they realized four research "waves', the most recent one at the beginning of this millennium in as many as eighty countries whose population makes 85% of the world population. This magnificent study presented a specific "cultural mapping of the world", and this mapping also confirmed the surprisingly great similarity between the population of the former communist countries on the basis of the comparison with twenty-four variables processed in the factorial-analytical manner. Out of the total of 24 countries in this group including China, in the value area of the coordinate system they were all located near one another, in the quadrant which links two most general values (of the second-level factors) - "the values of poverty" and "the values of the secular-rational authority". The exceptions were Slovenia and Poland the former being inclined toward the developed world and the pole denoting "the values of prosperity" (they are also called "the values of self-expression"), and the latter because of the pronounced religiousness of its population, directed toward the pole denoting "the values of traditional authority". Analyzing also some other data (the Study contains 300 value variables), we confirmed the authors' conclusion about the similarities of values of the citizens from the former communist countries, and the proof for that can be found in some other researches, too. Unfortunately, for the time being the complexity of this determinist knot directs the explanations of the similarities between the values of these countries to the hypothetical domains. Still, it seems that the most plausible explanation is the civilization one which would combine diverse factors: historical economic, social-structural, political and culturological (ethnic religious, linguistic)