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Social Modernization and the End of Ideology Debate: Patterns of Ideological Polarization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2006

RUSSELL J. DALTON
RUSSELL J. DALTON
Affiliation:
Irvine University of California, 3151 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697-5100. [email protected]
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Abstract

Over 40 years ago, Daniel Bell made the provocative claim that ideological polarization was diminishing in Western democracies, but new ideologies were emerging and driving politics in developing nations. This article tests the End of Ideology thesis with a new wave of public opinion data from the World Values Survey (WVS) that covers over 70 nations representing more than 80 per cent of the world's population. We find that polarization along the Left/Right dimension is substantially greater in the less affluent and less democratic societies than in advanced industrial democracies. The correlates of Left/Right orientations also vary systematically across regions. The twin pillars of economic and religious cleavages remain important in European states; cultural values and nationalism provide stronger bases of ideology in Asia and the Middle East. As Bell suggested, social modernization does seem to transform the extent and bases of ideological polarization within contemporary societies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , April 2006 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Prepared for the conference on ‘Beliefs, Norms and Values in Cross-national Surveys’, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, December 2004.
I would like to thank Alix van Sickle for her assistance on work that led to the research presented here, Kamal Sadiq for our discussions about this research, and Ronald Inglehart for providing access to the World Values Survey data.