Evolutionary Modernization Theory: Why People's Motivations are Changing

Abstract

A society's culture is shaped by the extent to which its people grow up feeling that survival is secure or insecure. This article presents a revised version of modernization theory -Evolutionary Modernization theorywhich argues that economic and physical insecurity are conducive to xenophobia, strong in-group solidarity, authoritarian politics and rigid adherence to their group's traditional cultural norms -and conversely that secure conditions lead to greater tolerance of outgroups, openness to new ideas and more egalitarian social norms.

The Role of Threat in the Human Empowerment Sequence

“…Second, there is substantial theoretical and empirical overlap between the HES and the authoritarianism literaturesomething also recently noted by Inglehart (2017). Both theories argue that resources affect value development.…”

“…In the discipline of Political Science, the political culture literature primarily aims to explain the rise of democracy. One prominent line of research in this literature began by considering value shift over generations and using this shift to explain the rise of democracy, first in the West and then elsewhere (Inglehart, 1971(Inglehart, , 1977(Inglehart, , 1988(Inglehart, , 1990(Inglehart, , 1997(Inglehart, , 2017. The initial focus in this research was on post-materialist values; how those raised in societies that had attained a high level of existential security, and could take such for granted, could move beyond a narrow focus on materialist values, those values concerned with meeting basic existential needs, to develop post-materialist values concerned with achieving goals that look beyond the acquisition of existential security to more psychosocial needs, such as social and political liberty.…”

Tourism and education in formation of the human capital agency

“…Development of tourism as a cultural industry is closely related to the emergence of leisure for a significant part of the population, with the growth of education and the search for new markets for investment by financial capital, and new markets for the location of production and sales by industrial and commercial capital (Dimitriou, 2017). The general intensification of movements, mobility as a fundamental characteristic of social behaviour during the formation and reformatting of modernity, is also relevant in the modern situation (Jamal & Robinson, 2009;Inglehart, 2017).…”

Unraveling the Black Mountain: Authoritarian Submission and Party Preference in Montenegro

“…However, upbringing is not the only factor that matters in the development of authoritarian submission, since the influence of authoritarian parenting might diminish when an individual is socialized in a progressive surrounding. In line with evolutionary modernization theory (Inglehart 2017), I argue for the importance of an additional element called conducive environment (Padilla, Hogan, and Kaiser 2007, 185). That is, evolutionary modernization theory claims that individuals have "relatively high or low levels of authoritarianism, in so far as they have been raised under low or high levels of existential security" (Inglehart 2017, 137).…”

“…Building upon evolutionary modernization theory (Inglehart 2017), this article argues that submissive tendencies, although originating in authoritarian upbringing, are dominantly reinforced in a conducive environment, where unstable socioeconomic factors serve as leading causes of authoritarian behavior and firm adherence to leaders (Inglehart 2017). The study demonstrates how economic factors and ethnic cleavages, in the context of Montenegro, only reproduce submissive behavior, originally acquired through authoritarian parental upbringing.…”