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The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies* RONALD INGLEHART University of Michigan and University of Geneva Economic Scarcity and Political Priorities: An Analytic Framework A transformation may be taking place in the political cultures of advanced industrial soci- eties. This transformation seems to be altering the basic value priorities of given generations, as a result of changing conditions influencing their basic socialization. The changes seem to affect the stand one takes on current political issues and may have a long-term tendency to alter existing patterns of political partisanship. In this article, I will present evidence based on surveys from six countries concerning these processes. The findings seem to support a specific inter- pretation of the causes of value change in post- industrial societies; let me first outline this in- terpretation. My basic hypothesis is that given individuals pursue various goals in hierarchical order—giving maximum attention to the things they sense to be the most important unsatisfied needs at a given time. 1 A man lost in a desert, for example, may be obsessed by his need for water, devoting virtually all his attention to the search for it. When a supply of water is readily available but food is scarce, he may take the former need for granted (having achieved bio- logical homeostasis in that respect) and may devote himself to gathering food. Once his food supply has reached a subsistence level, an indi- vidual may continue striving in order to pile up a comfortable margin of economic security; later, he may gradually shift his focus, coming to desire worldly goods as symbols of affluence —more in order to enhance his status among less affluent acquaintances than for the utility of the goods themselves. In a sense, however, the pursuit of symbols of affluence could be re- garded as derivative from the search for sus- tenance. * The author is indebted to Samuel Barnes, Karl Deutsch, Kent Jennings, Warren Miller, Robert Put- nam, and Donald Stokes for comments and criticism of an earlier draft of this article. 1 For a more complete presentation of this hypothe- sis, see Ronald Inglehart, "Revolutionnarisme Post- Bourgeois en France, en Allemagne et aux fitats-Unis," // Politico, 36, 2 (1971) 209-238; and Ronald Inglehart and Leon Lindberg, "Political Cleavages in Post-Indus- trial Society: the May Revolt in France" (forthcoming). Important groups among the populations of Western societies have passed beyond these stages, we believe, and today are acting in pur- suit of goals which (unlike symbols of afflu- ence) no longer have a direct relationship to the imperatives of economic security. 2 These individuals—drawn largely from the younger cohorts of the modern middle class—have been socialized during an unprecedentedly long pe- riod of unprecedentedly high affluence. For them, economic security may be taken for granted, as the supply of water or the air we breathe once could. If this hypothesis is correct, it suggests that intergenerational political conflict is likely. We would expect to find such conflict if it is true that individuals have a tendency to retain a given value hierarchy throughout adult life, once a basic character has been formed during childhood and youth. An illustration would be the miser who experienced economic hardship during his childhood, saw hard work and fru- gality as a way out, and continued accumulat- ing frantically long after his economic needs had been assured. This is, no doubt, an ex- treme case, but considerable evidence suggests that people do tend to retain early-instilled preferences. Drawing on the work of Abraham Maslow, 3 we reason that the age cohorts who had experienced the wars and scarcities of the era preceding the West European economic miracles would accord a relatively high priority to economic security and to what Maslow terms the safety needs. For the younger co- horts, a set of "post-bourgeois" values, relating to the need for belonging and to asthetic and ! An example of induced reversion to biological priorities, under starvation conditions, is described in James C. Davies, Human Nature and Politics (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 13. A conscientious objector taking part in an experiment progressively lost his in- terest in social welfare work after a number of weeks on a semistarvation diet. "See Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Person- ality (New York: Harper, 1954). An excellent discus- sion of value hierarchies and their political implica- tions appears in Robert E. Lane, Political Thinking and Consciousness (Chicago: Markham, 1970), Chap- ter 2. 991 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core . University of Basel Library , on 10 Jul 2017 at 15:01:18 , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms . https://doi.org/10.2307/1953494
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Page 1: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

The Silent Revolution in EuropeIntergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies

RONALD INGLEHART

University of Michigan and University of Geneva

Economic Scarcity and Political PrioritiesAn Analytic Framework

A transformation may be taking place in thepolitical cultures of advanced industrial soci-eties This transformation seems to be alteringthe basic value priorities of given generationsas a result of changing conditions influencingtheir basic socialization The changes seem toaffect the stand one takes on current politicalissues and may have a long-term tendency toalter existing patterns of political partisanshipIn this article I will present evidence based onsurveys from six countries concerning theseprocesses

The findings seem to support a specific inter-pretation of the causes of value change in post-industrial societies let me first outline this in-terpretation My basic hypothesis is that givenindividuals pursue various goals in hierarchicalordermdashgiving maximum attention to the thingsthey sense to be the most important unsatisfiedneeds at a given time1 A man lost in a desertfor example may be obsessed by his need forwater devoting virtually all his attention to thesearch for it When a supply of water is readilyavailable but food is scarce he may take theformer need for granted (having achieved bio-logical homeostasis in that respect) and maydevote himself to gathering food Once his foodsupply has reached a subsistence level an indi-vidual may continue striving in order to pile upa comfortable margin of economic securitylater he may gradually shift his focus comingto desire worldly goods as symbols of affluencemdashmore in order to enhance his status amongless affluent acquaintances than for the utilityof the goods themselves In a sense howeverthe pursuit of symbols of affluence could be re-garded as derivative from the search for sus-tenance

The author is indebted to Samuel Barnes KarlDeutsch Kent Jennings Warren Miller Robert Put-nam and Donald Stokes for comments and criticismof an earlier draft of this article

1 For a more complete presentation of this hypothe-sis see Ronald Inglehart Revolutionnarisme Post-Bourgeois en France en Allemagne et aux fitats-Unis Politico 36 2 (1971) 209-238 and Ronald Inglehartand Leon Lindberg Political Cleavages in Post-Indus-trial Society the May Revolt in France (forthcoming)

Important groups among the populations ofWestern societies have passed beyond thesestages we believe and today are acting in pur-suit of goals which (unlike symbols of afflu-ence) no longer have a direct relationship tothe imperatives of economic security2 Theseindividualsmdashdrawn largely from the youngercohorts of the modern middle classmdashhave beensocialized during an unprecedentedly long pe-riod of unprecedentedly high affluence Forthem economic security may be taken forgranted as the supply of water or the air webreathe once could

If this hypothesis is correct it suggests thatintergenerational political conflict is likely Wewould expect to find such conflict if it is truethat individuals have a tendency to retain agiven value hierarchy throughout adult lifeonce a basic character has been formed duringchildhood and youth An illustration would bethe miser who experienced economic hardshipduring his childhood saw hard work and fru-gality as a way out and continued accumulat-ing frantically long after his economic needshad been assured This is no doubt an ex-treme case but considerable evidence suggeststhat people do tend to retain early-instilledpreferences Drawing on the work of AbrahamMaslow3 we reason that the age cohorts whohad experienced the wars and scarcities of theera preceding the West European economicmiracles would accord a relatively high priorityto economic security and to what Maslowterms the safety needs For the younger co-horts a set of post-bourgeois values relatingto the need for belonging and to asthetic and

An example of induced reversion to biologicalpriorities under starvation conditions is described inJames C Davies Human Nature and Politics (NewYork Wiley 1963) p 13 A conscientious objectortaking part in an experiment progressively lost his in-terest in social welfare work after a number of weekson a semistarvation diet

See Abraham H Maslow Motivation and Person-ality (New York Harper 1954) An excellent discus-sion of value hierarchies and their political implica-tions appears in Robert E Lane Political Thinkingand Consciousness (Chicago Markham 1970) Chap-ter 2

991

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intellectual needs would be more likely to taketop priorities4

Probably the best documented evidence ofthe persistence of early-instilled political pref-erences is found in the area of political partyidentification5 But it is precisely in this areathat our hypotheses have another interestingimplicationmdashthey suggest the presence of along-term pressure acting to reshape previousrelationships between social class and politicalparty preference If the shift to a new set ofvalue priorities results from attainment of a sat-uration level in regard to needs previouslygiven top priority we would expect a new or-dering of values to manifest itself first and mostfully among those groups that have attained thehighest levels of affluence In other words wewould expect to find it appearing first amongthe upper middle class and among workingclass or farm groups only after a considerabledelay But despite the fact that middle-class sta-tus has generally tended to be associated with apreference for relatively conservative politicalparties the newly emerging type of value prior-ities seems likely to be linked with support forradical social change Under given conditionswe believe this can lead to massive shifts to thepolitical parties of the Left on the part of youn-ger middle-class groups Conversely working-class respondents would be relatively likely tohave underlying value preferences which makethem potential recruits for conservative partiesmdashdespite their traditional association with par-ties of the Left These individuals have attaineda certain level of prosperity relatively recentlyand apparently continue to place a compara-tively high value on defending and extendingtheir recent gains Paradoxically although theyhave working-class occupations they may man-ifest what is sometimes regarded as a bour-geois mentality

1 Supporting evidence might be drawn from RichardFlacks study of political activists and nonactivistsamong University of Chicago students His findingsindicate that students from relatively affluent homestend to place greater emphasis on involvement in in-tellectual and esthetic pursuits humanitarian consider-ations and opportunities for self-expression and theytend to de-emphasize material success personalachievement conventional morality and religiositymoreover they are much more likely to become acti-vists than students from less affluent backgrounds SeeRichard Flacks The Revolt of the Advantaged AnExploration of the Roots of Student Protest Jour-nal of Social Issues 23 (1967)

See among others Angus Campbell Philip Con-verse Warren Miller and Donald Stokes The Ameri-can Voter (New York Wiley I960) Cf Philip Con-verse and Georges Dupeux Politicization of theElectorate in France and the US in Angus Camp-bell et al Elections and the Political Order (NewYork Wiley 1966) Chapter 14

In short the middle majority6 hypothesismay have been correct as far as it went in-creasing affluence would make the workingclass feel they had a stake in the system Bycomparison with the emerging post-bourgeoisgroup both the proletariat and bourgeoisie ofindustrial society shared certain acquisitive val-ues their conflicts were not due to differencesin basic value priorities but to the fact that oneparty had and was overwhelmingly eager tokeep what the other party wanted above all Ifthis were indeed the case an increasing degreeof property ownership might well embourgeoi-sify the workers lessening the intensity of classconflict Nevertheless Western societies do notseem to have reached a new era of consensualpolitics the emergence of post-bourgeoisvalue priorities among a small but critical sec-tor of these societies may lead to a phase dur-ing which political cleavages will no longer bebased primarily on the familiar economic con-flictsmdashbut will increasingly be polarized ac-cording to differences in underlying value pri-orities7 This new axis of political cleavagewould initially oppose one section of the mid-dle class to the remainder of society Assumingcontinued prosperity however our analysissuggests that this deviant group would grow inrelative size

In a recent article8 the outcome of theFrench 1968 uprising and elections was inter-preted on the basis of the foregoing conceptualscheme The May Revolt we argued was anevent which had an exceptionally powerful im-pact on the French electorate causing manyvoters to re-examine their habitual party prefer-ences in the light of underlying valuesmdashand torealign themselves accordingly Although theprevailing rhetoric of the May Revolt cast it asthe movement of an exploited proletariat risingagainst bourgeois Gaullist oppression in thesubsequent elections the French working classshowed a net shift which favored the Gaullistsmdashwhile the modern middle class9 (especially

0 This line of reasoning is presented in Ralf Dahren-dorf Recent Changes in the Class Structure of Euro-pean Societies and in Seymour Lipset The Chang-ing Class Structure and Contemporary EuropeanPolitics both in A New Europe ed Stephen Grau-bard (Boston Beacon 1967)

Joseph Schumpeter reasoned along somewhat simi-lar lines in Capitalism Socialism and Democracy (NewYork Harper 1942)

8 See Inglehart op citbullWe distinguish between the modem middle class

and the traditional middle class on the basis of occu-pation the latter group consists of self-employed smallbusinessmen and artisans the former group comprisespeople with nonmanual occupations in the modernsector of the economy and tends to be characterizedby a higher level of economic security (and a lower

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993

its younger members) showed a net shift to theLeft by comparison with the way these groupshad voted in 1967 They apparently did so inpart because the younger middle class tendedto place a lower value on economic securityand domestic order than did the workers Thedisorders of 1968mdashparticularly insofar as theyentailed destruction of propertymdashseem to havehad a negative impact on the working classdriving many of them from their traditionallyLeftist political loyalties toward support ofGeneral De Gaullemdashwho was widely seen asthe guarantor of order

Thanks to an ongoing program of publicopinion research sponsored by the EuropeanCommunity it was possible to take a set of pre-dictions based on this interpretation of the1968 French data and subject them to a moreexhaustive cross-national test Working in col-laboration with the European Community In-formation Service I took part in the design ofa six-nation survey of political change in West-ern Europe which went into the field in 197010

Items included in these surveys were de-signed to tap politically relevant aspects of anindividuals basic value hierarchy We wantedto know which values a respondent would rankhighest when he was forced to choose on theone hand between such things as economic se-curity and domestic order (which we regarded asindicating instrumental or acquisitive val-ues) and on the other items relating to expres-sive or post-bourgeois value priorities Ourexpectation was that those who had been so-cialized under conditions of relatively high andstable affluence should show a relative prefer-ence for such values as free speech and politi-cal participation In the current social contextit was hypothesized these values should belinked with a relatively change-oriented standon current political issues And if as hypothe-sized we are dealing with a basic rather than aperipheral aspect of the individuals socializa-tion we should find indications that these pref-erences influence a broad range of his politicalopinions

We might expect the emergence of valuepreferences which do not conform to those ofsociety as a whole to be linked with a prefer-

likelihood of being attracted to extreme-Right politicalmovements) Our use of this distinction was suggestedby Seymour Martin Lipsets analysis in Political ManThe Social Bases of Politics (Garden City DoubledayI960) especially Chapter 5

10 We are indebted to Jacques-Ren6 Rabier director-general of the European Community Information Ser-vice for the role he has played in encouraging cross-national collaborative research with Michigan (and anumber of other universities) over the past severalyears

ence for change-oriented political partiesmdashinterms of traditional concepts the parties of theLeft This tendency would be resisted howeverby another aspect of the presumed persistenceof early political learningmdashthe tendency to-ward persistence of early-instilled politicalparty identification To the extent that given in-dividuals have acquired a sense of identificationwith the (traditionally middle-class) parties ofthe Right and Center they would be slow toshift their support to a party of the Left evenassuming the presence of favorable underlyingvalue preferences The converse should alsohold true respondents who were raised in aLeft-oriented political tradition would normallybe somewhat inhibited from shifting to partiesof the Right even assuming the presence of rel-atively conservative value preferences

An Empirically-based Typology of Value Pri-orities and Its Expected Relationship to

Economic HistoryThese hypotheses concern changes in value

priorities over long periods of time Very littlerelevant time-series data is available and conse-quently one cannot test this interpretation di-rectly To do so conclusively would require alarge-scale research program continuing overseveral decades In the meantime however onecan subject these hypotheses to a variety of indi-rect tests While these tests cannot provide adefinitive validation or falsification they mayaid the reader in forming a judgment concern-ing the relative plausibility of this interpreta-tion in the light of the total configuration ofevidence

The first type of indirect evidence is drawnfrom cross-sectional age-cohort analysis Thisapproach involves substantial methodologicalproblems Can one in fact draw conclusionsabout change over time from cross-sectionaldata Under some conditions the answer ratherclearly is yes it depends on how much confi-dence one has that the cross-sectional datameasure relatively stable characteristics of agiven age cohort11 To take an obvious exam-ple you can project how many 21-year-oldsthere will be in the US ten years from now

11 For a sophisticated discussion and application ofthis type of analysis see David Butler and DonaldStokes Political Change in Britain Forces ShapingElectoral Choice (New York St Martins 1969)especially Chapters 3 11 and 12 Butler and Stokesfind that political party affiliation is a rather stablecharacteristic of British cohorts In the relatively largeswing from Conservative to Labour which took placefrom 1959 to 1963 they conclude replacement of theelectorate (linked with differential birth and mortalityrates) actually played a larger role than did conver-sion of voters from one party to the other

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Table 1 Educational Level by Age Cohort

(Percentage educated beyond primary school)

Age range ofcohort in

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

Neth

876658444025

Belg

876967503517

Italy

846043352928

France

776250393330

Germany

483929332823

Britain

473726241913

and twenty years from now if you have dataon the size of the various age-groups todayYour prediction might be upset by a major waror other catastrophe but otherwise it is likelyto be fairly accurate To take another examplelet us look at the differences in educational lev-els among the respective age cohorts in our sixnational samples (See Table 1) The differ-ences are quite sizeable reflecting the massiveexpansion of secondary and higher education inWestern Europe during the past two genera-tions These figures I would argue reflect a rel-atively enduring characteristic of the respectiveage cohorts except among the youngest groupthe level is unlikely to rise much nor is it likelyto decline for any of the cohorts The presenceof a high level of formal education may wellhave important effects on the political behaviorof a given group To the extent that such rela-tionships can be demonstrated longitudinalprojections derived from the age-cohort differ-ences are likely to be reasonably reliable

With these remarks in mind let us examinethe pattern of responses to a series of itemswhich were designed to measure an individualshierarchy of politically relevant values Repre-sentative national samples of the populationover 15 years of age in Great Britain Ger-many Belgium The Netherlands France andItaly were asked the question12

Fieldwork was carried out in February and March1970 by Louis Harris Research Ltd (London) In-stitut fur Demoskopie Allensbach) International Re-search Associates (Brussels) Netherlands Institut voorde Publieke Opinie (Amsterdam) Institut francaisdopinion publique (Paris) and Institut per le Ri-cerche Statische e 1Analisi delopinione Pubblica (Mi-lan) The respective samples had Ns of 1975 (Brit-ain) 2021 (Germany) 1298 (Belgium) 1230 (Nether-lands) 2046 (France) and 1822 (Italy)

The survey also included Luxembourg but the num-ber of respondents from that country (335) was con-sidered too small for use in the present analysis TheDutch sample has been weighed to correct for sam-pling deficiencies and the weighted N appears in thefollowing tables while the data from The Netherlandsare in the authors opinion less reliable than those

If you had to choose among the followingthings which are the two that seem most desir-able to you

Maintaining order in the nationGiving the people more say in important po-

litical decisionsFighting rising pricesProtecting freedom of speechTwo choices only were permitted thus

(aside from nonresponse and partial nonre-sponse) it was possible for a respondent to se-lect any of six possible pairs of items In rela-tion to my hypotheses two of the items (thefirst and third) were regarded as indicating tra-ditional acquisitive value preferences a con-cern with domestic order is presumed to relateabove all to the protection of property13 and

from the other countries the crucial intra-sample dif-ferences discussed in this article are sufficiently largeas to minimize the likelihood that they simply reflectsampling error On the other hand cross-national com-parisons based on the Dutch marginals should beviewed with reservations The surveys in the EuropeanCommunity countries were sponsored by the EuropeanCommunity Information Service research in GreatBritain was supported by funds from the Universityof Michigan

From the viewpoint of most of our respondentsthat is in extreme situations threats to domestic ordercan of course involve danger to ones life To theextent that a concern with ones personal safety isinvolved the item taps the need which Maslow placesimmediately below the economic needs in his hierarchyPost-bourgeois responses then are seen as reflectingsecurity in respect to both the economic and safetyneeds There is reason to expect that the intergener-ational pattern of priorities would be similar for thetwo types of needs older cohorts are more likely tohave experienced threats to their physical security aswell as to their economic security during formativeyears The persisting effect of the former experienceis suggested by the fact that older Germans are morelikely to express a fear of World War than are thepost-war cohorts see Peter Merkl Politico-CulturalRestraints on West-German Foreign Policy Com-parative Political Studies 3 (January 1971) Wedoubt that many of our respondents felt physicallythreatened in 1970 however for most this item prob-ably evokes nothing more than thoughts of propertydamage

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Table 2 Pure Value Pairs by Nation

(Percentage choosing each pair within given national sample)

Pair chosen

AcquisitivePost-bourgeois

Nether

3017

Belgium

3214

Italy

3513

France

3811

Germany

4310

Britain

368

the relevance of rising prices to acquisitive mo-tivations is fairly self-evident The other twoitems in this set were regarded as indicating apreference for post-bourgeois values I usethe latter term with an awareness that politicalliberties were among the things traditionallyvalued by the bourgeoisiemdashbut with the con-viction that this group was characterized evenmore distinctively by a predominant concernfor acquiring and retaining economic goods Itis not a question of valuing one thing posi-tively and the other negatively other items inour data indicate that most people place a posi-tive value on all four of the above goals But inpolitics it is sometimes impossible to maximizeone good without detriment to another In suchcases the relative priority among valued objec-tives becomes a vital consideration Our ques-tions therefore were cast in the form offorced-choice items in an attempt to measurethese priorities Empirically it appears that al-though nearly everyone strongly favors free-dom of speech (for example) there are strik-ing differences in the priority given to it by var-ious social groups

The choice of one post-bourgeois itemshowed a relatively strong positive correlationwith the choice of the other post-bourgeoisitem in each national sample the same wastrue of the two acquisitive items Thus ap-proximately half of the respondents in eachsample chose one of the two pure pairs ofvalue preferences with the other half spreadover the four remaining mixed (or ambiva-lent) pairs plus nonresponse (See Table 2)Note that the pure acquisitive pair predomi-nates across the six samples by a ratio of atleast 3 1

On the basis of the choices made amongthese four items it is possible to classify our

We follow the Marxist tradition in according animportant role to economic determinationmdashalthoughonly within certain thresholds Both before industrial-ization and after an industrial society reaches athreshold of general economic security we believe thatother values are likely to prevail more widely Theconcept of discretionary income is analogous to ourinterpretation of the second threshold as an economyrises well above the subsistence level even specificallyeconomic behavior can be explained by economic vari-ables to a progressively diminishing extent

respondents into value-priority groups rangingfrom a pure acquisitive type to a pure post-bourgeois type with several intermediate cate-gories Use of this typology provides a simplestraightforward and intuitively meaningful basisfor analysis I should emphasize however thatthe use of these categories does not rest exclu-sively on an individuals choices among the fourgoals listed above On the contrary these fourwere selected as the basis of our typology becausethey seem to constitute a particularly sensitiveindicator of a broad range of other politicalpreferencesmdashsome of which have a fairly obvi-ous relationship to the four basic items andsome of which appear to be quite distinct interms of face content For example on the basisof the value pair chosen by a given individualone can make a fairly accurate prediction of hisresponse to the following item

Within the last couple of years there havebeen large-scale student demonstrations in (Brit-ain) and other countries In general how doyou view these Are you

mdashvery favorablemdashrather favorablemdashrather unfavorablemdashvery unfavorableTable 3 shows the respective levels of sup-

port for student demonstrations in each of thesix countries While the majority is unfavorablein each country there is a wide variation insupport levels according to the pair of valuechoices made a mean difference of fully fifty-five percentage points separates the acqui-sitive and post-bourgeois types of respon-dents In every country respondents choos-ing the pure post-bourgeois pair are thegroup most favorable to student demonstra-tions giving a heavy majority in support Over-all they are more than four times as likely tofavor the demonstrations as are the acquisi-tive respondents With only one exceptionamong the 36 value pairs shown respondentschoosing the pure acquisitive value pair areleast favorable to the student demonstrations(in the one exceptional case the acquisitiverespondents are within three percentage pointsof the least favorable group)

Factor analyses of the respective nationalsamples consistently showed these value choices

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Table 3 Attitude Toward Student Demonstrations by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage favorable to student demonstrations)

Nation

NethItalyBelgGermFranceBritmean

Orderamp

Prices

21191814121216

Order ampFree

Speech

33292935182228

Order ampPartici-pation

42363629239

29

Prices ampFree

Speech

37423235382235

Prices ampPartici-pation

47546046416051

Free Speechamp Partici-pation

70776583666571

Overall

393635322717

Indicates the two pure value pairs on the basis of our hypothesismdashrepresenting respectively acquisitiveand post-bourgeois values

to be among the high-loading items (in a set of25 variables) on what I interpret as an acquis-itivepost-bourgeois values factor14 In everycase the choice of order and prices hadrelatively high negative loadings on this factorwhile the choice of free speech and partici-pation had relatively high positive loadings

In view of the face content of the items it isnot particularly surprising that we find a strongrelationship between these value choices andthe respondents support of or opposition tostudent demonstrations But these same valuechoices also show significant relationships withother political preferences which have no obvi-ous similarity in terms of face content For ex-ample they serve as good predictors of atti-tudes toward supranational European integra-tion Table 4 shows the relationship betweenvalue choices and responses to a three-item in-dex of support for European integration15

Other high-loading items on this factor relatedto expectations of a higher standard of living sup-port for student demonstrations support for radicalsocial change and support for a variety of proposalsfor European integration (all of which had positivepolarity) and emphasis on job security pride in onesown nationality and support for a strong nationalarmy (which had negative polarity) Because of limitedfunds the British questionnaire was shorter than theone used in the European Community countries andthe factor analysis for that sample omits some of theitems available in the larger data sets Apart fromthese omissions the British response pattern seems toparallel that found on the Continent The fact that ex-pectations of a higher future standard of living seemto go with giving a relatively low priority to economicsecurity is interesting it tends to confirm our inter-pretation that for the post-bourgeois group economicvalues are relatively unimportant because they aretaken for granted

uThis index was based on responses to the follow-ing items Supposing the people of Britain and theCommon Market were asked to decide on the follow-ing questions How would you vote

Once again we find the two theoreticallypure sets of value priorities occupying theopposite poles of the continuummdashwith post-bourgeois respondents markedly more Euro-pean in outlook than the acquisitive-type re-spondents There are only two mild exceptionsto the rule that the respondents choosing thetheoretically ambivalent value pairs are moreEuropean than the theoretically pure acquisi-tives types and less European than the post-bourgeois types The ordering within the am-bivalent pairs changes somewhat from the pat-tern we found in Table 3 with a concern forrising prices now showing a stronger associa-tion with the negative end of the scale than thepreoccupation with domestic order which for-merly held that place in other respects theranking of value pairs remains the same Over-all the post-bourgeois respondents are morethan twice as likely to be classified as clearly

mdashWould you be in favor of or against the elec-tion of a European parliament by direct universalsuffrage that is a parliament elected by all thevoters in the member countries

mdashWould you be willing to accept over and abovethe (British) government a European governmentresponsible for a common policy in foreign affairsdefense and the economy

mdashIf a President of a United States of Europewere being elected by popular vote would you bewilling to vote for a candidate not of your owncountry if his personality and programme corre-sponded more closely to your ideas than those ofthe candidates from your own country

A respondent was categorized as clearly for Euro-pean integration if he gave favorable responses to allthree of these items or to at least two of them pro-vided that his response to the third item was dontknow rather than against For a much more de-tailed exploration of this topic see my article Chang-ing Value Priorities and European Integration Journalof Common Market Studies September 1971

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 997

Table 4 Support for European Integration by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage scored as Clearly For on European Integration Index)

Nation

ItalyGermanyFranceBelgiumNetherlandsBritainmean

Pricesamp

Order

48453631281330

Prices ampFree

Speech

53573839311636

Prices ampPartici-pation

63644843341641

Order ampFree

Speech

65674846433647

Order ampPartici-pation

73596150522049

Free Speechamp Partici-

pation

69766964623261

Overall

575544423917

bull Indicates the two pure value pairs

for supranational European integration as arethe acquisitive respondents16

As we shall see presently these value choicesalso show a rather striking set of relationshipswith social structure and political party prefer-ences This is scarcely the sort of pattern whichwould emerge from random answering or froma superficial response to transient stimuli It ap-pears that these items tap a relatively well inte-grated and deep-rooted aspect of the respon-dents political orientations

If these items do tap attitudes that are earlyestablished and relatively persistent responsesto them should show distinctive patterns re-flecting distinctive conditions which prevailedduring the formative years of the respective agecohorts Our next step therefore is to examinevariations in response according to age groupBefore doing so let us attempt to specify asprecisely as possible what sort of pattern we

would expect to find on the basis of our ana-lytic framework

In the first place the most recently formedcohorts should show the highest proportion ofpost-bourgeois responses and the lowest pro-portion of acquisitive responses in every na-tional sample The respondents born after 1945constitute the only group which (as far back astheir memory reaches) has been socialized en-tirely under conditions of rising affluence unin-terrupted by major economic dislocations Asa first approximation therefore we would pre-dict that (1) the distribution of attitudesshould resemble an L-shaped curve with a verylow proportion of post-bourgeois attitudes be-ing found among respondents born before1945 and a sharp rise in the prevalence ofpost-bourgeois values among those born afterthat date conversely the occurrence of acquisi-tive values should be uniformly high among all

10 There is a certain similarity between the configura-tion of post-bourgeois preferences and the well-known concept of authoritarianism Both conceptsrelate to the priorities one gives to liberty as opposedto order Andmdashas we have just seenmdashthe libertarianposition seems linked with internationalism This fol-lows from the fact that according to our analysis thepost-bourgeois groups have attained security in regardto both the safety and sustenance needs insofar asthe nation-state is seen as a bulwark protecting theindividual against foreign threats it is less important topost-bourgeois respondents They have moreover alarger amount of venture capital psychically speak-ing available to invest in projects having an intel-lectual and esthetic appealmdashsuch as European unifica-tion There are both theoretical and empirical differ-ences between our position and that prevailing in theauthoritarianism literature We emphasize a process ofhistorically-shaped causation which is not necessarilyincompatible with but certainly takes a different focusfrom the psychodynamics of authoritarianism Em-pirically authoritarianism like acquisitive value pri-orities tends to be linked with lower economic statusBy contrast there are indications that children andyouth tend to be more authoritarian than adults

(Stouffer however reported evidence of sizeable age-group differences among adult groups in degree ofTolerance for Non-Conformity with young adultsfar more tolerant than older adults he sees the evi-dence as reflecting both life-cycle and intergenerationaleffects See Samuel Stouffer Communism Conformityand Civil Liberties [New York Doubleday 1955]p 89) In any event neither previous explorations northe present surveys revealed reasonably strong or con-sistent relationships between standardized F-scale itemsand the attitudes reported here The two concepts seemrelated but items which served as indicators of au-thoritarianism in earlier research appear to havelimited applicability in the Europe of the 1970s Fora report of an earlier cross-national exploration ofauthoritarianism and internationalism see RonaldInglehart The New Europeans Inward or OutwardLooking International Organization Vol 24 No 1(Winter 1970) pp 129-139 The literature on au-thoritarianism is immense the classic work is TheodorW Adomo et a The Authoritarian Personality (NewYork Harper 1950) Cf Richard Christie and MarieJahoda eds Studies in the Scope and Method ofThe Authoritarian Personality (Glencoe Free Press1954)

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The American Political Science Review Vol 65

1920 8938 1950 I960 1970

US I US I US JUS

I Brit BSwe HSwe iswe

[Brit JSwitz |Ger

bullDen VSwitz

Brit j^Fr

I Den

Nor

Belg

Neth

Brit

|

Figure 1 The decline in Britains relative economic position The US and major European countriesranked according to per capita Gross National Product 1900 to 1970 (Source The Economist Sep-tember 5 1970 p 69)

cohorts bom before 1945 with a precipitatedrop as we reach the postwar cohorts This pat-tern can only serve as a first approximation ofcourse It would be ridiculous to argue that nochange in basic values can occur during adultlife our point is simply that the probability ofsuch change becomes much lower after onereaches adulthood and probably continues todecline thereafter To the extent that adult re-learning takes place it would tend to smoothout the basic L-shaped curve The fact thatvalue preferences probably crystallize in differ-ent individuals at somewhat different ageswould also tend to have this effect

We would not expect to find a zero incidenceof post-bourgeois values even among the oldestcohorts there has always been at least a smallstratum of economically secure individuals

able to give top priority to nonacquisitive val-ues But this stratum should be smallest amongthe oldest cohorts if indeed it tends to reflectthe level of affluence prevailing within a givensociety during a given cohorts pre-adult years

By the same token the distribution of thesevalue preferences should vary cross-nationallyin a predictable fashionmdashreflecting the eco-nomic history of the given nation Fortunatelyfor our analysis there are substantial differ-ences in the 20th-century economic experiencesof the nations in our sample These variationsenable us to make predictions about the rela-tive level and steepness of the value-distributioncurves for given nations To put it briefly highabsolute levels of wealth in a given nation at agiven time would predict relatively high pro-portions of post-bourgeois respondents among

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 999

the cohorts socialized under those conditionshigh rates of growth for a given country wouldpredict relatively large increases in the propor-tion of post-bourgeois respondents across thatnations age-groups The economic progress ofGreat Britain in particular shows a sharp con-trast with that of the other five nationsThroughout the first four decades of the 20thcentury Britainmdashthe home of the first Indus-trial Revolutionmdashwas by far the wealthiestcountry in Europe and in world wide compari-sons it ranked second only to the US (andsometimes Canada) in per capita income Dur-ing the decade before World War II among thenations in our sample The Netherlands rankedclosest to Britain (with a per capita income 71per cent as high as the British) followed byFrance Belgium and Germany with Italy farbehind (having only 27 per cent the per capitaincome of Britain) In the postwar era the eco-nomically privileged position which Britain hadlong enjoyed began to deteriorate rapidly (seeFigure 1) Although her absolute level of incomerose gradually (interrupted by periods of stag-nation) Britain was overtaken by one after an-other of her European neighborsmdashnearly all ofwhich experienced much more rapid and con-tinuous economic growth these growth rateswere particularly steep in the case of Germanyand Italy (see Figure 2) By 1970 Britain hadbeen outstripped by five of the six EuropeanCommunity countries with the sixth (Italy)not far behind

On the basis of these historical data we canmake four predictions about the expectedvalue-distribution curves in addition to the re-shaped curve posited earlier in our first predic-tion (2) Among those respondents whoreached adulthood before World War II thesize of the stratum which had known economicsecurity during its formative years would besmallmdashbut its relative size should be greater inthe British sample than in the other nationalsamples Translated into expected survey re-sults this means that the British cohorts now intheir mid-50s or older should show the highestfrequency of post-bourgeois values (3) Therate of value change found in Britain howevershould be much lower than that in the otherfive countries Her economic growth rate sinceWorld War II has been approximately half thatof the average among the European Communitycountries as a first approximation we mightexpect the rate of increase in post-bourgeoisvalues found among Britains younger cohortsto be half as great as that within the EEC (4)In prevalence of post-bourgeois values amongthe younger cohorts we might expect Britain tobe outstripped by all of the European Commu-

320

300

280

2S0

240

220

200

ISO

160

140

120

100

Italy

UnitedKingdom

1953 IS58 1963 1968

Figure 2 Economic growth 1953-68 Based onindices of industrial production (1953 = 100)Source UN Statistical Yearbook 1969

The year 1953 is taken as our base line to avoid givingundue prominence to recovery from the devastation olWorld War II using 1948 or 1945 as a base wouldtend to exaggerate the disparity between Germany andItaly (on one hand) and Great Britain (on the otherhand)

nity countries except Italy (5) Among thesesix nations Germany and Italymdashthe two coun-tries experiencing the most rapid economicchange during the post-war eramdashshould showthe greatest amount of intergenerational changein basic value priorities17

With these five predictions in mind let us ex-amine the empirical relationship between valuepreferences and age cohort within each na-tional sample (See Table 5) Our basic predic-tionmdashthat the younger cohorts will be lesslikely to show acquisitive value priorities andmore likely to show post-bourgeois valuesmdashisconfirmed strikingly Among the oldest cohortthe disproportionate preference for the pure

11 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national patternas a reaction to current events within the respectivenations There is considerable evidence of a recentlaw-and-order reaction in the face of student disordersin each of these countries But if the cross-nationaldifferences were largely the result of such a reactionwe would expect to find the emphasis on order to begreatest in France (where the recent upheaval wasgreatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had thesmallest amount of domestic disorder) The data mani-festly fail to fit this pattern we must explain them interms of predispositions anterior to rather than result-ing from the recent domestic disorders these countrieshave experienced

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JOOO The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1001

ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 2: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

992 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

intellectual needs would be more likely to taketop priorities4

Probably the best documented evidence ofthe persistence of early-instilled political pref-erences is found in the area of political partyidentification5 But it is precisely in this areathat our hypotheses have another interestingimplicationmdashthey suggest the presence of along-term pressure acting to reshape previousrelationships between social class and politicalparty preference If the shift to a new set ofvalue priorities results from attainment of a sat-uration level in regard to needs previouslygiven top priority we would expect a new or-dering of values to manifest itself first and mostfully among those groups that have attained thehighest levels of affluence In other words wewould expect to find it appearing first amongthe upper middle class and among workingclass or farm groups only after a considerabledelay But despite the fact that middle-class sta-tus has generally tended to be associated with apreference for relatively conservative politicalparties the newly emerging type of value prior-ities seems likely to be linked with support forradical social change Under given conditionswe believe this can lead to massive shifts to thepolitical parties of the Left on the part of youn-ger middle-class groups Conversely working-class respondents would be relatively likely tohave underlying value preferences which makethem potential recruits for conservative partiesmdashdespite their traditional association with par-ties of the Left These individuals have attaineda certain level of prosperity relatively recentlyand apparently continue to place a compara-tively high value on defending and extendingtheir recent gains Paradoxically although theyhave working-class occupations they may man-ifest what is sometimes regarded as a bour-geois mentality

1 Supporting evidence might be drawn from RichardFlacks study of political activists and nonactivistsamong University of Chicago students His findingsindicate that students from relatively affluent homestend to place greater emphasis on involvement in in-tellectual and esthetic pursuits humanitarian consider-ations and opportunities for self-expression and theytend to de-emphasize material success personalachievement conventional morality and religiositymoreover they are much more likely to become acti-vists than students from less affluent backgrounds SeeRichard Flacks The Revolt of the Advantaged AnExploration of the Roots of Student Protest Jour-nal of Social Issues 23 (1967)

See among others Angus Campbell Philip Con-verse Warren Miller and Donald Stokes The Ameri-can Voter (New York Wiley I960) Cf Philip Con-verse and Georges Dupeux Politicization of theElectorate in France and the US in Angus Camp-bell et al Elections and the Political Order (NewYork Wiley 1966) Chapter 14

In short the middle majority6 hypothesismay have been correct as far as it went in-creasing affluence would make the workingclass feel they had a stake in the system Bycomparison with the emerging post-bourgeoisgroup both the proletariat and bourgeoisie ofindustrial society shared certain acquisitive val-ues their conflicts were not due to differencesin basic value priorities but to the fact that oneparty had and was overwhelmingly eager tokeep what the other party wanted above all Ifthis were indeed the case an increasing degreeof property ownership might well embourgeoi-sify the workers lessening the intensity of classconflict Nevertheless Western societies do notseem to have reached a new era of consensualpolitics the emergence of post-bourgeoisvalue priorities among a small but critical sec-tor of these societies may lead to a phase dur-ing which political cleavages will no longer bebased primarily on the familiar economic con-flictsmdashbut will increasingly be polarized ac-cording to differences in underlying value pri-orities7 This new axis of political cleavagewould initially oppose one section of the mid-dle class to the remainder of society Assumingcontinued prosperity however our analysissuggests that this deviant group would grow inrelative size

In a recent article8 the outcome of theFrench 1968 uprising and elections was inter-preted on the basis of the foregoing conceptualscheme The May Revolt we argued was anevent which had an exceptionally powerful im-pact on the French electorate causing manyvoters to re-examine their habitual party prefer-ences in the light of underlying valuesmdashand torealign themselves accordingly Although theprevailing rhetoric of the May Revolt cast it asthe movement of an exploited proletariat risingagainst bourgeois Gaullist oppression in thesubsequent elections the French working classshowed a net shift which favored the Gaullistsmdashwhile the modern middle class9 (especially

0 This line of reasoning is presented in Ralf Dahren-dorf Recent Changes in the Class Structure of Euro-pean Societies and in Seymour Lipset The Chang-ing Class Structure and Contemporary EuropeanPolitics both in A New Europe ed Stephen Grau-bard (Boston Beacon 1967)

Joseph Schumpeter reasoned along somewhat simi-lar lines in Capitalism Socialism and Democracy (NewYork Harper 1942)

8 See Inglehart op citbullWe distinguish between the modem middle class

and the traditional middle class on the basis of occu-pation the latter group consists of self-employed smallbusinessmen and artisans the former group comprisespeople with nonmanual occupations in the modernsector of the economy and tends to be characterizedby a higher level of economic security (and a lower

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993

its younger members) showed a net shift to theLeft by comparison with the way these groupshad voted in 1967 They apparently did so inpart because the younger middle class tendedto place a lower value on economic securityand domestic order than did the workers Thedisorders of 1968mdashparticularly insofar as theyentailed destruction of propertymdashseem to havehad a negative impact on the working classdriving many of them from their traditionallyLeftist political loyalties toward support ofGeneral De Gaullemdashwho was widely seen asthe guarantor of order

Thanks to an ongoing program of publicopinion research sponsored by the EuropeanCommunity it was possible to take a set of pre-dictions based on this interpretation of the1968 French data and subject them to a moreexhaustive cross-national test Working in col-laboration with the European Community In-formation Service I took part in the design ofa six-nation survey of political change in West-ern Europe which went into the field in 197010

Items included in these surveys were de-signed to tap politically relevant aspects of anindividuals basic value hierarchy We wantedto know which values a respondent would rankhighest when he was forced to choose on theone hand between such things as economic se-curity and domestic order (which we regarded asindicating instrumental or acquisitive val-ues) and on the other items relating to expres-sive or post-bourgeois value priorities Ourexpectation was that those who had been so-cialized under conditions of relatively high andstable affluence should show a relative prefer-ence for such values as free speech and politi-cal participation In the current social contextit was hypothesized these values should belinked with a relatively change-oriented standon current political issues And if as hypothe-sized we are dealing with a basic rather than aperipheral aspect of the individuals socializa-tion we should find indications that these pref-erences influence a broad range of his politicalopinions

We might expect the emergence of valuepreferences which do not conform to those ofsociety as a whole to be linked with a prefer-

likelihood of being attracted to extreme-Right politicalmovements) Our use of this distinction was suggestedby Seymour Martin Lipsets analysis in Political ManThe Social Bases of Politics (Garden City DoubledayI960) especially Chapter 5

10 We are indebted to Jacques-Ren6 Rabier director-general of the European Community Information Ser-vice for the role he has played in encouraging cross-national collaborative research with Michigan (and anumber of other universities) over the past severalyears

ence for change-oriented political partiesmdashinterms of traditional concepts the parties of theLeft This tendency would be resisted howeverby another aspect of the presumed persistenceof early political learningmdashthe tendency to-ward persistence of early-instilled politicalparty identification To the extent that given in-dividuals have acquired a sense of identificationwith the (traditionally middle-class) parties ofthe Right and Center they would be slow toshift their support to a party of the Left evenassuming the presence of favorable underlyingvalue preferences The converse should alsohold true respondents who were raised in aLeft-oriented political tradition would normallybe somewhat inhibited from shifting to partiesof the Right even assuming the presence of rel-atively conservative value preferences

An Empirically-based Typology of Value Pri-orities and Its Expected Relationship to

Economic HistoryThese hypotheses concern changes in value

priorities over long periods of time Very littlerelevant time-series data is available and conse-quently one cannot test this interpretation di-rectly To do so conclusively would require alarge-scale research program continuing overseveral decades In the meantime however onecan subject these hypotheses to a variety of indi-rect tests While these tests cannot provide adefinitive validation or falsification they mayaid the reader in forming a judgment concern-ing the relative plausibility of this interpreta-tion in the light of the total configuration ofevidence

The first type of indirect evidence is drawnfrom cross-sectional age-cohort analysis Thisapproach involves substantial methodologicalproblems Can one in fact draw conclusionsabout change over time from cross-sectionaldata Under some conditions the answer ratherclearly is yes it depends on how much confi-dence one has that the cross-sectional datameasure relatively stable characteristics of agiven age cohort11 To take an obvious exam-ple you can project how many 21-year-oldsthere will be in the US ten years from now

11 For a sophisticated discussion and application ofthis type of analysis see David Butler and DonaldStokes Political Change in Britain Forces ShapingElectoral Choice (New York St Martins 1969)especially Chapters 3 11 and 12 Butler and Stokesfind that political party affiliation is a rather stablecharacteristic of British cohorts In the relatively largeswing from Conservative to Labour which took placefrom 1959 to 1963 they conclude replacement of theelectorate (linked with differential birth and mortalityrates) actually played a larger role than did conver-sion of voters from one party to the other

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994 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 1 Educational Level by Age Cohort

(Percentage educated beyond primary school)

Age range ofcohort in

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

Neth

876658444025

Belg

876967503517

Italy

846043352928

France

776250393330

Germany

483929332823

Britain

473726241913

and twenty years from now if you have dataon the size of the various age-groups todayYour prediction might be upset by a major waror other catastrophe but otherwise it is likelyto be fairly accurate To take another examplelet us look at the differences in educational lev-els among the respective age cohorts in our sixnational samples (See Table 1) The differ-ences are quite sizeable reflecting the massiveexpansion of secondary and higher education inWestern Europe during the past two genera-tions These figures I would argue reflect a rel-atively enduring characteristic of the respectiveage cohorts except among the youngest groupthe level is unlikely to rise much nor is it likelyto decline for any of the cohorts The presenceof a high level of formal education may wellhave important effects on the political behaviorof a given group To the extent that such rela-tionships can be demonstrated longitudinalprojections derived from the age-cohort differ-ences are likely to be reasonably reliable

With these remarks in mind let us examinethe pattern of responses to a series of itemswhich were designed to measure an individualshierarchy of politically relevant values Repre-sentative national samples of the populationover 15 years of age in Great Britain Ger-many Belgium The Netherlands France andItaly were asked the question12

Fieldwork was carried out in February and March1970 by Louis Harris Research Ltd (London) In-stitut fur Demoskopie Allensbach) International Re-search Associates (Brussels) Netherlands Institut voorde Publieke Opinie (Amsterdam) Institut francaisdopinion publique (Paris) and Institut per le Ri-cerche Statische e 1Analisi delopinione Pubblica (Mi-lan) The respective samples had Ns of 1975 (Brit-ain) 2021 (Germany) 1298 (Belgium) 1230 (Nether-lands) 2046 (France) and 1822 (Italy)

The survey also included Luxembourg but the num-ber of respondents from that country (335) was con-sidered too small for use in the present analysis TheDutch sample has been weighed to correct for sam-pling deficiencies and the weighted N appears in thefollowing tables while the data from The Netherlandsare in the authors opinion less reliable than those

If you had to choose among the followingthings which are the two that seem most desir-able to you

Maintaining order in the nationGiving the people more say in important po-

litical decisionsFighting rising pricesProtecting freedom of speechTwo choices only were permitted thus

(aside from nonresponse and partial nonre-sponse) it was possible for a respondent to se-lect any of six possible pairs of items In rela-tion to my hypotheses two of the items (thefirst and third) were regarded as indicating tra-ditional acquisitive value preferences a con-cern with domestic order is presumed to relateabove all to the protection of property13 and

from the other countries the crucial intra-sample dif-ferences discussed in this article are sufficiently largeas to minimize the likelihood that they simply reflectsampling error On the other hand cross-national com-parisons based on the Dutch marginals should beviewed with reservations The surveys in the EuropeanCommunity countries were sponsored by the EuropeanCommunity Information Service research in GreatBritain was supported by funds from the Universityof Michigan

From the viewpoint of most of our respondentsthat is in extreme situations threats to domestic ordercan of course involve danger to ones life To theextent that a concern with ones personal safety isinvolved the item taps the need which Maslow placesimmediately below the economic needs in his hierarchyPost-bourgeois responses then are seen as reflectingsecurity in respect to both the economic and safetyneeds There is reason to expect that the intergener-ational pattern of priorities would be similar for thetwo types of needs older cohorts are more likely tohave experienced threats to their physical security aswell as to their economic security during formativeyears The persisting effect of the former experienceis suggested by the fact that older Germans are morelikely to express a fear of World War than are thepost-war cohorts see Peter Merkl Politico-CulturalRestraints on West-German Foreign Policy Com-parative Political Studies 3 (January 1971) Wedoubt that many of our respondents felt physicallythreatened in 1970 however for most this item prob-ably evokes nothing more than thoughts of propertydamage

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 995

Table 2 Pure Value Pairs by Nation

(Percentage choosing each pair within given national sample)

Pair chosen

AcquisitivePost-bourgeois

Nether

3017

Belgium

3214

Italy

3513

France

3811

Germany

4310

Britain

368

the relevance of rising prices to acquisitive mo-tivations is fairly self-evident The other twoitems in this set were regarded as indicating apreference for post-bourgeois values I usethe latter term with an awareness that politicalliberties were among the things traditionallyvalued by the bourgeoisiemdashbut with the con-viction that this group was characterized evenmore distinctively by a predominant concernfor acquiring and retaining economic goods Itis not a question of valuing one thing posi-tively and the other negatively other items inour data indicate that most people place a posi-tive value on all four of the above goals But inpolitics it is sometimes impossible to maximizeone good without detriment to another In suchcases the relative priority among valued objec-tives becomes a vital consideration Our ques-tions therefore were cast in the form offorced-choice items in an attempt to measurethese priorities Empirically it appears that al-though nearly everyone strongly favors free-dom of speech (for example) there are strik-ing differences in the priority given to it by var-ious social groups

The choice of one post-bourgeois itemshowed a relatively strong positive correlationwith the choice of the other post-bourgeoisitem in each national sample the same wastrue of the two acquisitive items Thus ap-proximately half of the respondents in eachsample chose one of the two pure pairs ofvalue preferences with the other half spreadover the four remaining mixed (or ambiva-lent) pairs plus nonresponse (See Table 2)Note that the pure acquisitive pair predomi-nates across the six samples by a ratio of atleast 3 1

On the basis of the choices made amongthese four items it is possible to classify our

We follow the Marxist tradition in according animportant role to economic determinationmdashalthoughonly within certain thresholds Both before industrial-ization and after an industrial society reaches athreshold of general economic security we believe thatother values are likely to prevail more widely Theconcept of discretionary income is analogous to ourinterpretation of the second threshold as an economyrises well above the subsistence level even specificallyeconomic behavior can be explained by economic vari-ables to a progressively diminishing extent

respondents into value-priority groups rangingfrom a pure acquisitive type to a pure post-bourgeois type with several intermediate cate-gories Use of this typology provides a simplestraightforward and intuitively meaningful basisfor analysis I should emphasize however thatthe use of these categories does not rest exclu-sively on an individuals choices among the fourgoals listed above On the contrary these fourwere selected as the basis of our typology becausethey seem to constitute a particularly sensitiveindicator of a broad range of other politicalpreferencesmdashsome of which have a fairly obvi-ous relationship to the four basic items andsome of which appear to be quite distinct interms of face content For example on the basisof the value pair chosen by a given individualone can make a fairly accurate prediction of hisresponse to the following item

Within the last couple of years there havebeen large-scale student demonstrations in (Brit-ain) and other countries In general how doyou view these Are you

mdashvery favorablemdashrather favorablemdashrather unfavorablemdashvery unfavorableTable 3 shows the respective levels of sup-

port for student demonstrations in each of thesix countries While the majority is unfavorablein each country there is a wide variation insupport levels according to the pair of valuechoices made a mean difference of fully fifty-five percentage points separates the acqui-sitive and post-bourgeois types of respon-dents In every country respondents choos-ing the pure post-bourgeois pair are thegroup most favorable to student demonstra-tions giving a heavy majority in support Over-all they are more than four times as likely tofavor the demonstrations as are the acquisi-tive respondents With only one exceptionamong the 36 value pairs shown respondentschoosing the pure acquisitive value pair areleast favorable to the student demonstrations(in the one exceptional case the acquisitiverespondents are within three percentage pointsof the least favorable group)

Factor analyses of the respective nationalsamples consistently showed these value choices

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Table 3 Attitude Toward Student Demonstrations by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage favorable to student demonstrations)

Nation

NethItalyBelgGermFranceBritmean

Orderamp

Prices

21191814121216

Order ampFree

Speech

33292935182228

Order ampPartici-pation

42363629239

29

Prices ampFree

Speech

37423235382235

Prices ampPartici-pation

47546046416051

Free Speechamp Partici-pation

70776583666571

Overall

393635322717

Indicates the two pure value pairs on the basis of our hypothesismdashrepresenting respectively acquisitiveand post-bourgeois values

to be among the high-loading items (in a set of25 variables) on what I interpret as an acquis-itivepost-bourgeois values factor14 In everycase the choice of order and prices hadrelatively high negative loadings on this factorwhile the choice of free speech and partici-pation had relatively high positive loadings

In view of the face content of the items it isnot particularly surprising that we find a strongrelationship between these value choices andthe respondents support of or opposition tostudent demonstrations But these same valuechoices also show significant relationships withother political preferences which have no obvi-ous similarity in terms of face content For ex-ample they serve as good predictors of atti-tudes toward supranational European integra-tion Table 4 shows the relationship betweenvalue choices and responses to a three-item in-dex of support for European integration15

Other high-loading items on this factor relatedto expectations of a higher standard of living sup-port for student demonstrations support for radicalsocial change and support for a variety of proposalsfor European integration (all of which had positivepolarity) and emphasis on job security pride in onesown nationality and support for a strong nationalarmy (which had negative polarity) Because of limitedfunds the British questionnaire was shorter than theone used in the European Community countries andthe factor analysis for that sample omits some of theitems available in the larger data sets Apart fromthese omissions the British response pattern seems toparallel that found on the Continent The fact that ex-pectations of a higher future standard of living seemto go with giving a relatively low priority to economicsecurity is interesting it tends to confirm our inter-pretation that for the post-bourgeois group economicvalues are relatively unimportant because they aretaken for granted

uThis index was based on responses to the follow-ing items Supposing the people of Britain and theCommon Market were asked to decide on the follow-ing questions How would you vote

Once again we find the two theoreticallypure sets of value priorities occupying theopposite poles of the continuummdashwith post-bourgeois respondents markedly more Euro-pean in outlook than the acquisitive-type re-spondents There are only two mild exceptionsto the rule that the respondents choosing thetheoretically ambivalent value pairs are moreEuropean than the theoretically pure acquisi-tives types and less European than the post-bourgeois types The ordering within the am-bivalent pairs changes somewhat from the pat-tern we found in Table 3 with a concern forrising prices now showing a stronger associa-tion with the negative end of the scale than thepreoccupation with domestic order which for-merly held that place in other respects theranking of value pairs remains the same Over-all the post-bourgeois respondents are morethan twice as likely to be classified as clearly

mdashWould you be in favor of or against the elec-tion of a European parliament by direct universalsuffrage that is a parliament elected by all thevoters in the member countries

mdashWould you be willing to accept over and abovethe (British) government a European governmentresponsible for a common policy in foreign affairsdefense and the economy

mdashIf a President of a United States of Europewere being elected by popular vote would you bewilling to vote for a candidate not of your owncountry if his personality and programme corre-sponded more closely to your ideas than those ofthe candidates from your own country

A respondent was categorized as clearly for Euro-pean integration if he gave favorable responses to allthree of these items or to at least two of them pro-vided that his response to the third item was dontknow rather than against For a much more de-tailed exploration of this topic see my article Chang-ing Value Priorities and European Integration Journalof Common Market Studies September 1971

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 997

Table 4 Support for European Integration by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage scored as Clearly For on European Integration Index)

Nation

ItalyGermanyFranceBelgiumNetherlandsBritainmean

Pricesamp

Order

48453631281330

Prices ampFree

Speech

53573839311636

Prices ampPartici-pation

63644843341641

Order ampFree

Speech

65674846433647

Order ampPartici-pation

73596150522049

Free Speechamp Partici-

pation

69766964623261

Overall

575544423917

bull Indicates the two pure value pairs

for supranational European integration as arethe acquisitive respondents16

As we shall see presently these value choicesalso show a rather striking set of relationshipswith social structure and political party prefer-ences This is scarcely the sort of pattern whichwould emerge from random answering or froma superficial response to transient stimuli It ap-pears that these items tap a relatively well inte-grated and deep-rooted aspect of the respon-dents political orientations

If these items do tap attitudes that are earlyestablished and relatively persistent responsesto them should show distinctive patterns re-flecting distinctive conditions which prevailedduring the formative years of the respective agecohorts Our next step therefore is to examinevariations in response according to age groupBefore doing so let us attempt to specify asprecisely as possible what sort of pattern we

would expect to find on the basis of our ana-lytic framework

In the first place the most recently formedcohorts should show the highest proportion ofpost-bourgeois responses and the lowest pro-portion of acquisitive responses in every na-tional sample The respondents born after 1945constitute the only group which (as far back astheir memory reaches) has been socialized en-tirely under conditions of rising affluence unin-terrupted by major economic dislocations Asa first approximation therefore we would pre-dict that (1) the distribution of attitudesshould resemble an L-shaped curve with a verylow proportion of post-bourgeois attitudes be-ing found among respondents born before1945 and a sharp rise in the prevalence ofpost-bourgeois values among those born afterthat date conversely the occurrence of acquisi-tive values should be uniformly high among all

10 There is a certain similarity between the configura-tion of post-bourgeois preferences and the well-known concept of authoritarianism Both conceptsrelate to the priorities one gives to liberty as opposedto order Andmdashas we have just seenmdashthe libertarianposition seems linked with internationalism This fol-lows from the fact that according to our analysis thepost-bourgeois groups have attained security in regardto both the safety and sustenance needs insofar asthe nation-state is seen as a bulwark protecting theindividual against foreign threats it is less important topost-bourgeois respondents They have moreover alarger amount of venture capital psychically speak-ing available to invest in projects having an intel-lectual and esthetic appealmdashsuch as European unifica-tion There are both theoretical and empirical differ-ences between our position and that prevailing in theauthoritarianism literature We emphasize a process ofhistorically-shaped causation which is not necessarilyincompatible with but certainly takes a different focusfrom the psychodynamics of authoritarianism Em-pirically authoritarianism like acquisitive value pri-orities tends to be linked with lower economic statusBy contrast there are indications that children andyouth tend to be more authoritarian than adults

(Stouffer however reported evidence of sizeable age-group differences among adult groups in degree ofTolerance for Non-Conformity with young adultsfar more tolerant than older adults he sees the evi-dence as reflecting both life-cycle and intergenerationaleffects See Samuel Stouffer Communism Conformityand Civil Liberties [New York Doubleday 1955]p 89) In any event neither previous explorations northe present surveys revealed reasonably strong or con-sistent relationships between standardized F-scale itemsand the attitudes reported here The two concepts seemrelated but items which served as indicators of au-thoritarianism in earlier research appear to havelimited applicability in the Europe of the 1970s Fora report of an earlier cross-national exploration ofauthoritarianism and internationalism see RonaldInglehart The New Europeans Inward or OutwardLooking International Organization Vol 24 No 1(Winter 1970) pp 129-139 The literature on au-thoritarianism is immense the classic work is TheodorW Adomo et a The Authoritarian Personality (NewYork Harper 1950) Cf Richard Christie and MarieJahoda eds Studies in the Scope and Method ofThe Authoritarian Personality (Glencoe Free Press1954)

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The American Political Science Review Vol 65

1920 8938 1950 I960 1970

US I US I US JUS

I Brit BSwe HSwe iswe

[Brit JSwitz |Ger

bullDen VSwitz

Brit j^Fr

I Den

Nor

Belg

Neth

Brit

|

Figure 1 The decline in Britains relative economic position The US and major European countriesranked according to per capita Gross National Product 1900 to 1970 (Source The Economist Sep-tember 5 1970 p 69)

cohorts bom before 1945 with a precipitatedrop as we reach the postwar cohorts This pat-tern can only serve as a first approximation ofcourse It would be ridiculous to argue that nochange in basic values can occur during adultlife our point is simply that the probability ofsuch change becomes much lower after onereaches adulthood and probably continues todecline thereafter To the extent that adult re-learning takes place it would tend to smoothout the basic L-shaped curve The fact thatvalue preferences probably crystallize in differ-ent individuals at somewhat different ageswould also tend to have this effect

We would not expect to find a zero incidenceof post-bourgeois values even among the oldestcohorts there has always been at least a smallstratum of economically secure individuals

able to give top priority to nonacquisitive val-ues But this stratum should be smallest amongthe oldest cohorts if indeed it tends to reflectthe level of affluence prevailing within a givensociety during a given cohorts pre-adult years

By the same token the distribution of thesevalue preferences should vary cross-nationallyin a predictable fashionmdashreflecting the eco-nomic history of the given nation Fortunatelyfor our analysis there are substantial differ-ences in the 20th-century economic experiencesof the nations in our sample These variationsenable us to make predictions about the rela-tive level and steepness of the value-distributioncurves for given nations To put it briefly highabsolute levels of wealth in a given nation at agiven time would predict relatively high pro-portions of post-bourgeois respondents among

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 999

the cohorts socialized under those conditionshigh rates of growth for a given country wouldpredict relatively large increases in the propor-tion of post-bourgeois respondents across thatnations age-groups The economic progress ofGreat Britain in particular shows a sharp con-trast with that of the other five nationsThroughout the first four decades of the 20thcentury Britainmdashthe home of the first Indus-trial Revolutionmdashwas by far the wealthiestcountry in Europe and in world wide compari-sons it ranked second only to the US (andsometimes Canada) in per capita income Dur-ing the decade before World War II among thenations in our sample The Netherlands rankedclosest to Britain (with a per capita income 71per cent as high as the British) followed byFrance Belgium and Germany with Italy farbehind (having only 27 per cent the per capitaincome of Britain) In the postwar era the eco-nomically privileged position which Britain hadlong enjoyed began to deteriorate rapidly (seeFigure 1) Although her absolute level of incomerose gradually (interrupted by periods of stag-nation) Britain was overtaken by one after an-other of her European neighborsmdashnearly all ofwhich experienced much more rapid and con-tinuous economic growth these growth rateswere particularly steep in the case of Germanyand Italy (see Figure 2) By 1970 Britain hadbeen outstripped by five of the six EuropeanCommunity countries with the sixth (Italy)not far behind

On the basis of these historical data we canmake four predictions about the expectedvalue-distribution curves in addition to the re-shaped curve posited earlier in our first predic-tion (2) Among those respondents whoreached adulthood before World War II thesize of the stratum which had known economicsecurity during its formative years would besmallmdashbut its relative size should be greater inthe British sample than in the other nationalsamples Translated into expected survey re-sults this means that the British cohorts now intheir mid-50s or older should show the highestfrequency of post-bourgeois values (3) Therate of value change found in Britain howevershould be much lower than that in the otherfive countries Her economic growth rate sinceWorld War II has been approximately half thatof the average among the European Communitycountries as a first approximation we mightexpect the rate of increase in post-bourgeoisvalues found among Britains younger cohortsto be half as great as that within the EEC (4)In prevalence of post-bourgeois values amongthe younger cohorts we might expect Britain tobe outstripped by all of the European Commu-

320

300

280

2S0

240

220

200

ISO

160

140

120

100

Italy

UnitedKingdom

1953 IS58 1963 1968

Figure 2 Economic growth 1953-68 Based onindices of industrial production (1953 = 100)Source UN Statistical Yearbook 1969

The year 1953 is taken as our base line to avoid givingundue prominence to recovery from the devastation olWorld War II using 1948 or 1945 as a base wouldtend to exaggerate the disparity between Germany andItaly (on one hand) and Great Britain (on the otherhand)

nity countries except Italy (5) Among thesesix nations Germany and Italymdashthe two coun-tries experiencing the most rapid economicchange during the post-war eramdashshould showthe greatest amount of intergenerational changein basic value priorities17

With these five predictions in mind let us ex-amine the empirical relationship between valuepreferences and age cohort within each na-tional sample (See Table 5) Our basic predic-tionmdashthat the younger cohorts will be lesslikely to show acquisitive value priorities andmore likely to show post-bourgeois valuesmdashisconfirmed strikingly Among the oldest cohortthe disproportionate preference for the pure

11 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national patternas a reaction to current events within the respectivenations There is considerable evidence of a recentlaw-and-order reaction in the face of student disordersin each of these countries But if the cross-nationaldifferences were largely the result of such a reactionwe would expect to find the emphasis on order to begreatest in France (where the recent upheaval wasgreatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had thesmallest amount of domestic disorder) The data mani-festly fail to fit this pattern we must explain them interms of predispositions anterior to rather than result-ing from the recent domestic disorders these countrieshave experienced

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Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1001

ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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1004 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 3: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993

its younger members) showed a net shift to theLeft by comparison with the way these groupshad voted in 1967 They apparently did so inpart because the younger middle class tendedto place a lower value on economic securityand domestic order than did the workers Thedisorders of 1968mdashparticularly insofar as theyentailed destruction of propertymdashseem to havehad a negative impact on the working classdriving many of them from their traditionallyLeftist political loyalties toward support ofGeneral De Gaullemdashwho was widely seen asthe guarantor of order

Thanks to an ongoing program of publicopinion research sponsored by the EuropeanCommunity it was possible to take a set of pre-dictions based on this interpretation of the1968 French data and subject them to a moreexhaustive cross-national test Working in col-laboration with the European Community In-formation Service I took part in the design ofa six-nation survey of political change in West-ern Europe which went into the field in 197010

Items included in these surveys were de-signed to tap politically relevant aspects of anindividuals basic value hierarchy We wantedto know which values a respondent would rankhighest when he was forced to choose on theone hand between such things as economic se-curity and domestic order (which we regarded asindicating instrumental or acquisitive val-ues) and on the other items relating to expres-sive or post-bourgeois value priorities Ourexpectation was that those who had been so-cialized under conditions of relatively high andstable affluence should show a relative prefer-ence for such values as free speech and politi-cal participation In the current social contextit was hypothesized these values should belinked with a relatively change-oriented standon current political issues And if as hypothe-sized we are dealing with a basic rather than aperipheral aspect of the individuals socializa-tion we should find indications that these pref-erences influence a broad range of his politicalopinions

We might expect the emergence of valuepreferences which do not conform to those ofsociety as a whole to be linked with a prefer-

likelihood of being attracted to extreme-Right politicalmovements) Our use of this distinction was suggestedby Seymour Martin Lipsets analysis in Political ManThe Social Bases of Politics (Garden City DoubledayI960) especially Chapter 5

10 We are indebted to Jacques-Ren6 Rabier director-general of the European Community Information Ser-vice for the role he has played in encouraging cross-national collaborative research with Michigan (and anumber of other universities) over the past severalyears

ence for change-oriented political partiesmdashinterms of traditional concepts the parties of theLeft This tendency would be resisted howeverby another aspect of the presumed persistenceof early political learningmdashthe tendency to-ward persistence of early-instilled politicalparty identification To the extent that given in-dividuals have acquired a sense of identificationwith the (traditionally middle-class) parties ofthe Right and Center they would be slow toshift their support to a party of the Left evenassuming the presence of favorable underlyingvalue preferences The converse should alsohold true respondents who were raised in aLeft-oriented political tradition would normallybe somewhat inhibited from shifting to partiesof the Right even assuming the presence of rel-atively conservative value preferences

An Empirically-based Typology of Value Pri-orities and Its Expected Relationship to

Economic HistoryThese hypotheses concern changes in value

priorities over long periods of time Very littlerelevant time-series data is available and conse-quently one cannot test this interpretation di-rectly To do so conclusively would require alarge-scale research program continuing overseveral decades In the meantime however onecan subject these hypotheses to a variety of indi-rect tests While these tests cannot provide adefinitive validation or falsification they mayaid the reader in forming a judgment concern-ing the relative plausibility of this interpreta-tion in the light of the total configuration ofevidence

The first type of indirect evidence is drawnfrom cross-sectional age-cohort analysis Thisapproach involves substantial methodologicalproblems Can one in fact draw conclusionsabout change over time from cross-sectionaldata Under some conditions the answer ratherclearly is yes it depends on how much confi-dence one has that the cross-sectional datameasure relatively stable characteristics of agiven age cohort11 To take an obvious exam-ple you can project how many 21-year-oldsthere will be in the US ten years from now

11 For a sophisticated discussion and application ofthis type of analysis see David Butler and DonaldStokes Political Change in Britain Forces ShapingElectoral Choice (New York St Martins 1969)especially Chapters 3 11 and 12 Butler and Stokesfind that political party affiliation is a rather stablecharacteristic of British cohorts In the relatively largeswing from Conservative to Labour which took placefrom 1959 to 1963 they conclude replacement of theelectorate (linked with differential birth and mortalityrates) actually played a larger role than did conver-sion of voters from one party to the other

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994 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 1 Educational Level by Age Cohort

(Percentage educated beyond primary school)

Age range ofcohort in

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

Neth

876658444025

Belg

876967503517

Italy

846043352928

France

776250393330

Germany

483929332823

Britain

473726241913

and twenty years from now if you have dataon the size of the various age-groups todayYour prediction might be upset by a major waror other catastrophe but otherwise it is likelyto be fairly accurate To take another examplelet us look at the differences in educational lev-els among the respective age cohorts in our sixnational samples (See Table 1) The differ-ences are quite sizeable reflecting the massiveexpansion of secondary and higher education inWestern Europe during the past two genera-tions These figures I would argue reflect a rel-atively enduring characteristic of the respectiveage cohorts except among the youngest groupthe level is unlikely to rise much nor is it likelyto decline for any of the cohorts The presenceof a high level of formal education may wellhave important effects on the political behaviorof a given group To the extent that such rela-tionships can be demonstrated longitudinalprojections derived from the age-cohort differ-ences are likely to be reasonably reliable

With these remarks in mind let us examinethe pattern of responses to a series of itemswhich were designed to measure an individualshierarchy of politically relevant values Repre-sentative national samples of the populationover 15 years of age in Great Britain Ger-many Belgium The Netherlands France andItaly were asked the question12

Fieldwork was carried out in February and March1970 by Louis Harris Research Ltd (London) In-stitut fur Demoskopie Allensbach) International Re-search Associates (Brussels) Netherlands Institut voorde Publieke Opinie (Amsterdam) Institut francaisdopinion publique (Paris) and Institut per le Ri-cerche Statische e 1Analisi delopinione Pubblica (Mi-lan) The respective samples had Ns of 1975 (Brit-ain) 2021 (Germany) 1298 (Belgium) 1230 (Nether-lands) 2046 (France) and 1822 (Italy)

The survey also included Luxembourg but the num-ber of respondents from that country (335) was con-sidered too small for use in the present analysis TheDutch sample has been weighed to correct for sam-pling deficiencies and the weighted N appears in thefollowing tables while the data from The Netherlandsare in the authors opinion less reliable than those

If you had to choose among the followingthings which are the two that seem most desir-able to you

Maintaining order in the nationGiving the people more say in important po-

litical decisionsFighting rising pricesProtecting freedom of speechTwo choices only were permitted thus

(aside from nonresponse and partial nonre-sponse) it was possible for a respondent to se-lect any of six possible pairs of items In rela-tion to my hypotheses two of the items (thefirst and third) were regarded as indicating tra-ditional acquisitive value preferences a con-cern with domestic order is presumed to relateabove all to the protection of property13 and

from the other countries the crucial intra-sample dif-ferences discussed in this article are sufficiently largeas to minimize the likelihood that they simply reflectsampling error On the other hand cross-national com-parisons based on the Dutch marginals should beviewed with reservations The surveys in the EuropeanCommunity countries were sponsored by the EuropeanCommunity Information Service research in GreatBritain was supported by funds from the Universityof Michigan

From the viewpoint of most of our respondentsthat is in extreme situations threats to domestic ordercan of course involve danger to ones life To theextent that a concern with ones personal safety isinvolved the item taps the need which Maslow placesimmediately below the economic needs in his hierarchyPost-bourgeois responses then are seen as reflectingsecurity in respect to both the economic and safetyneeds There is reason to expect that the intergener-ational pattern of priorities would be similar for thetwo types of needs older cohorts are more likely tohave experienced threats to their physical security aswell as to their economic security during formativeyears The persisting effect of the former experienceis suggested by the fact that older Germans are morelikely to express a fear of World War than are thepost-war cohorts see Peter Merkl Politico-CulturalRestraints on West-German Foreign Policy Com-parative Political Studies 3 (January 1971) Wedoubt that many of our respondents felt physicallythreatened in 1970 however for most this item prob-ably evokes nothing more than thoughts of propertydamage

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 995

Table 2 Pure Value Pairs by Nation

(Percentage choosing each pair within given national sample)

Pair chosen

AcquisitivePost-bourgeois

Nether

3017

Belgium

3214

Italy

3513

France

3811

Germany

4310

Britain

368

the relevance of rising prices to acquisitive mo-tivations is fairly self-evident The other twoitems in this set were regarded as indicating apreference for post-bourgeois values I usethe latter term with an awareness that politicalliberties were among the things traditionallyvalued by the bourgeoisiemdashbut with the con-viction that this group was characterized evenmore distinctively by a predominant concernfor acquiring and retaining economic goods Itis not a question of valuing one thing posi-tively and the other negatively other items inour data indicate that most people place a posi-tive value on all four of the above goals But inpolitics it is sometimes impossible to maximizeone good without detriment to another In suchcases the relative priority among valued objec-tives becomes a vital consideration Our ques-tions therefore were cast in the form offorced-choice items in an attempt to measurethese priorities Empirically it appears that al-though nearly everyone strongly favors free-dom of speech (for example) there are strik-ing differences in the priority given to it by var-ious social groups

The choice of one post-bourgeois itemshowed a relatively strong positive correlationwith the choice of the other post-bourgeoisitem in each national sample the same wastrue of the two acquisitive items Thus ap-proximately half of the respondents in eachsample chose one of the two pure pairs ofvalue preferences with the other half spreadover the four remaining mixed (or ambiva-lent) pairs plus nonresponse (See Table 2)Note that the pure acquisitive pair predomi-nates across the six samples by a ratio of atleast 3 1

On the basis of the choices made amongthese four items it is possible to classify our

We follow the Marxist tradition in according animportant role to economic determinationmdashalthoughonly within certain thresholds Both before industrial-ization and after an industrial society reaches athreshold of general economic security we believe thatother values are likely to prevail more widely Theconcept of discretionary income is analogous to ourinterpretation of the second threshold as an economyrises well above the subsistence level even specificallyeconomic behavior can be explained by economic vari-ables to a progressively diminishing extent

respondents into value-priority groups rangingfrom a pure acquisitive type to a pure post-bourgeois type with several intermediate cate-gories Use of this typology provides a simplestraightforward and intuitively meaningful basisfor analysis I should emphasize however thatthe use of these categories does not rest exclu-sively on an individuals choices among the fourgoals listed above On the contrary these fourwere selected as the basis of our typology becausethey seem to constitute a particularly sensitiveindicator of a broad range of other politicalpreferencesmdashsome of which have a fairly obvi-ous relationship to the four basic items andsome of which appear to be quite distinct interms of face content For example on the basisof the value pair chosen by a given individualone can make a fairly accurate prediction of hisresponse to the following item

Within the last couple of years there havebeen large-scale student demonstrations in (Brit-ain) and other countries In general how doyou view these Are you

mdashvery favorablemdashrather favorablemdashrather unfavorablemdashvery unfavorableTable 3 shows the respective levels of sup-

port for student demonstrations in each of thesix countries While the majority is unfavorablein each country there is a wide variation insupport levels according to the pair of valuechoices made a mean difference of fully fifty-five percentage points separates the acqui-sitive and post-bourgeois types of respon-dents In every country respondents choos-ing the pure post-bourgeois pair are thegroup most favorable to student demonstra-tions giving a heavy majority in support Over-all they are more than four times as likely tofavor the demonstrations as are the acquisi-tive respondents With only one exceptionamong the 36 value pairs shown respondentschoosing the pure acquisitive value pair areleast favorable to the student demonstrations(in the one exceptional case the acquisitiverespondents are within three percentage pointsof the least favorable group)

Factor analyses of the respective nationalsamples consistently showed these value choices

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996 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 3 Attitude Toward Student Demonstrations by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage favorable to student demonstrations)

Nation

NethItalyBelgGermFranceBritmean

Orderamp

Prices

21191814121216

Order ampFree

Speech

33292935182228

Order ampPartici-pation

42363629239

29

Prices ampFree

Speech

37423235382235

Prices ampPartici-pation

47546046416051

Free Speechamp Partici-pation

70776583666571

Overall

393635322717

Indicates the two pure value pairs on the basis of our hypothesismdashrepresenting respectively acquisitiveand post-bourgeois values

to be among the high-loading items (in a set of25 variables) on what I interpret as an acquis-itivepost-bourgeois values factor14 In everycase the choice of order and prices hadrelatively high negative loadings on this factorwhile the choice of free speech and partici-pation had relatively high positive loadings

In view of the face content of the items it isnot particularly surprising that we find a strongrelationship between these value choices andthe respondents support of or opposition tostudent demonstrations But these same valuechoices also show significant relationships withother political preferences which have no obvi-ous similarity in terms of face content For ex-ample they serve as good predictors of atti-tudes toward supranational European integra-tion Table 4 shows the relationship betweenvalue choices and responses to a three-item in-dex of support for European integration15

Other high-loading items on this factor relatedto expectations of a higher standard of living sup-port for student demonstrations support for radicalsocial change and support for a variety of proposalsfor European integration (all of which had positivepolarity) and emphasis on job security pride in onesown nationality and support for a strong nationalarmy (which had negative polarity) Because of limitedfunds the British questionnaire was shorter than theone used in the European Community countries andthe factor analysis for that sample omits some of theitems available in the larger data sets Apart fromthese omissions the British response pattern seems toparallel that found on the Continent The fact that ex-pectations of a higher future standard of living seemto go with giving a relatively low priority to economicsecurity is interesting it tends to confirm our inter-pretation that for the post-bourgeois group economicvalues are relatively unimportant because they aretaken for granted

uThis index was based on responses to the follow-ing items Supposing the people of Britain and theCommon Market were asked to decide on the follow-ing questions How would you vote

Once again we find the two theoreticallypure sets of value priorities occupying theopposite poles of the continuummdashwith post-bourgeois respondents markedly more Euro-pean in outlook than the acquisitive-type re-spondents There are only two mild exceptionsto the rule that the respondents choosing thetheoretically ambivalent value pairs are moreEuropean than the theoretically pure acquisi-tives types and less European than the post-bourgeois types The ordering within the am-bivalent pairs changes somewhat from the pat-tern we found in Table 3 with a concern forrising prices now showing a stronger associa-tion with the negative end of the scale than thepreoccupation with domestic order which for-merly held that place in other respects theranking of value pairs remains the same Over-all the post-bourgeois respondents are morethan twice as likely to be classified as clearly

mdashWould you be in favor of or against the elec-tion of a European parliament by direct universalsuffrage that is a parliament elected by all thevoters in the member countries

mdashWould you be willing to accept over and abovethe (British) government a European governmentresponsible for a common policy in foreign affairsdefense and the economy

mdashIf a President of a United States of Europewere being elected by popular vote would you bewilling to vote for a candidate not of your owncountry if his personality and programme corre-sponded more closely to your ideas than those ofthe candidates from your own country

A respondent was categorized as clearly for Euro-pean integration if he gave favorable responses to allthree of these items or to at least two of them pro-vided that his response to the third item was dontknow rather than against For a much more de-tailed exploration of this topic see my article Chang-ing Value Priorities and European Integration Journalof Common Market Studies September 1971

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 997

Table 4 Support for European Integration by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage scored as Clearly For on European Integration Index)

Nation

ItalyGermanyFranceBelgiumNetherlandsBritainmean

Pricesamp

Order

48453631281330

Prices ampFree

Speech

53573839311636

Prices ampPartici-pation

63644843341641

Order ampFree

Speech

65674846433647

Order ampPartici-pation

73596150522049

Free Speechamp Partici-

pation

69766964623261

Overall

575544423917

bull Indicates the two pure value pairs

for supranational European integration as arethe acquisitive respondents16

As we shall see presently these value choicesalso show a rather striking set of relationshipswith social structure and political party prefer-ences This is scarcely the sort of pattern whichwould emerge from random answering or froma superficial response to transient stimuli It ap-pears that these items tap a relatively well inte-grated and deep-rooted aspect of the respon-dents political orientations

If these items do tap attitudes that are earlyestablished and relatively persistent responsesto them should show distinctive patterns re-flecting distinctive conditions which prevailedduring the formative years of the respective agecohorts Our next step therefore is to examinevariations in response according to age groupBefore doing so let us attempt to specify asprecisely as possible what sort of pattern we

would expect to find on the basis of our ana-lytic framework

In the first place the most recently formedcohorts should show the highest proportion ofpost-bourgeois responses and the lowest pro-portion of acquisitive responses in every na-tional sample The respondents born after 1945constitute the only group which (as far back astheir memory reaches) has been socialized en-tirely under conditions of rising affluence unin-terrupted by major economic dislocations Asa first approximation therefore we would pre-dict that (1) the distribution of attitudesshould resemble an L-shaped curve with a verylow proportion of post-bourgeois attitudes be-ing found among respondents born before1945 and a sharp rise in the prevalence ofpost-bourgeois values among those born afterthat date conversely the occurrence of acquisi-tive values should be uniformly high among all

10 There is a certain similarity between the configura-tion of post-bourgeois preferences and the well-known concept of authoritarianism Both conceptsrelate to the priorities one gives to liberty as opposedto order Andmdashas we have just seenmdashthe libertarianposition seems linked with internationalism This fol-lows from the fact that according to our analysis thepost-bourgeois groups have attained security in regardto both the safety and sustenance needs insofar asthe nation-state is seen as a bulwark protecting theindividual against foreign threats it is less important topost-bourgeois respondents They have moreover alarger amount of venture capital psychically speak-ing available to invest in projects having an intel-lectual and esthetic appealmdashsuch as European unifica-tion There are both theoretical and empirical differ-ences between our position and that prevailing in theauthoritarianism literature We emphasize a process ofhistorically-shaped causation which is not necessarilyincompatible with but certainly takes a different focusfrom the psychodynamics of authoritarianism Em-pirically authoritarianism like acquisitive value pri-orities tends to be linked with lower economic statusBy contrast there are indications that children andyouth tend to be more authoritarian than adults

(Stouffer however reported evidence of sizeable age-group differences among adult groups in degree ofTolerance for Non-Conformity with young adultsfar more tolerant than older adults he sees the evi-dence as reflecting both life-cycle and intergenerationaleffects See Samuel Stouffer Communism Conformityand Civil Liberties [New York Doubleday 1955]p 89) In any event neither previous explorations northe present surveys revealed reasonably strong or con-sistent relationships between standardized F-scale itemsand the attitudes reported here The two concepts seemrelated but items which served as indicators of au-thoritarianism in earlier research appear to havelimited applicability in the Europe of the 1970s Fora report of an earlier cross-national exploration ofauthoritarianism and internationalism see RonaldInglehart The New Europeans Inward or OutwardLooking International Organization Vol 24 No 1(Winter 1970) pp 129-139 The literature on au-thoritarianism is immense the classic work is TheodorW Adomo et a The Authoritarian Personality (NewYork Harper 1950) Cf Richard Christie and MarieJahoda eds Studies in the Scope and Method ofThe Authoritarian Personality (Glencoe Free Press1954)

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The American Political Science Review Vol 65

1920 8938 1950 I960 1970

US I US I US JUS

I Brit BSwe HSwe iswe

[Brit JSwitz |Ger

bullDen VSwitz

Brit j^Fr

I Den

Nor

Belg

Neth

Brit

|

Figure 1 The decline in Britains relative economic position The US and major European countriesranked according to per capita Gross National Product 1900 to 1970 (Source The Economist Sep-tember 5 1970 p 69)

cohorts bom before 1945 with a precipitatedrop as we reach the postwar cohorts This pat-tern can only serve as a first approximation ofcourse It would be ridiculous to argue that nochange in basic values can occur during adultlife our point is simply that the probability ofsuch change becomes much lower after onereaches adulthood and probably continues todecline thereafter To the extent that adult re-learning takes place it would tend to smoothout the basic L-shaped curve The fact thatvalue preferences probably crystallize in differ-ent individuals at somewhat different ageswould also tend to have this effect

We would not expect to find a zero incidenceof post-bourgeois values even among the oldestcohorts there has always been at least a smallstratum of economically secure individuals

able to give top priority to nonacquisitive val-ues But this stratum should be smallest amongthe oldest cohorts if indeed it tends to reflectthe level of affluence prevailing within a givensociety during a given cohorts pre-adult years

By the same token the distribution of thesevalue preferences should vary cross-nationallyin a predictable fashionmdashreflecting the eco-nomic history of the given nation Fortunatelyfor our analysis there are substantial differ-ences in the 20th-century economic experiencesof the nations in our sample These variationsenable us to make predictions about the rela-tive level and steepness of the value-distributioncurves for given nations To put it briefly highabsolute levels of wealth in a given nation at agiven time would predict relatively high pro-portions of post-bourgeois respondents among

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 999

the cohorts socialized under those conditionshigh rates of growth for a given country wouldpredict relatively large increases in the propor-tion of post-bourgeois respondents across thatnations age-groups The economic progress ofGreat Britain in particular shows a sharp con-trast with that of the other five nationsThroughout the first four decades of the 20thcentury Britainmdashthe home of the first Indus-trial Revolutionmdashwas by far the wealthiestcountry in Europe and in world wide compari-sons it ranked second only to the US (andsometimes Canada) in per capita income Dur-ing the decade before World War II among thenations in our sample The Netherlands rankedclosest to Britain (with a per capita income 71per cent as high as the British) followed byFrance Belgium and Germany with Italy farbehind (having only 27 per cent the per capitaincome of Britain) In the postwar era the eco-nomically privileged position which Britain hadlong enjoyed began to deteriorate rapidly (seeFigure 1) Although her absolute level of incomerose gradually (interrupted by periods of stag-nation) Britain was overtaken by one after an-other of her European neighborsmdashnearly all ofwhich experienced much more rapid and con-tinuous economic growth these growth rateswere particularly steep in the case of Germanyand Italy (see Figure 2) By 1970 Britain hadbeen outstripped by five of the six EuropeanCommunity countries with the sixth (Italy)not far behind

On the basis of these historical data we canmake four predictions about the expectedvalue-distribution curves in addition to the re-shaped curve posited earlier in our first predic-tion (2) Among those respondents whoreached adulthood before World War II thesize of the stratum which had known economicsecurity during its formative years would besmallmdashbut its relative size should be greater inthe British sample than in the other nationalsamples Translated into expected survey re-sults this means that the British cohorts now intheir mid-50s or older should show the highestfrequency of post-bourgeois values (3) Therate of value change found in Britain howevershould be much lower than that in the otherfive countries Her economic growth rate sinceWorld War II has been approximately half thatof the average among the European Communitycountries as a first approximation we mightexpect the rate of increase in post-bourgeoisvalues found among Britains younger cohortsto be half as great as that within the EEC (4)In prevalence of post-bourgeois values amongthe younger cohorts we might expect Britain tobe outstripped by all of the European Commu-

320

300

280

2S0

240

220

200

ISO

160

140

120

100

Italy

UnitedKingdom

1953 IS58 1963 1968

Figure 2 Economic growth 1953-68 Based onindices of industrial production (1953 = 100)Source UN Statistical Yearbook 1969

The year 1953 is taken as our base line to avoid givingundue prominence to recovery from the devastation olWorld War II using 1948 or 1945 as a base wouldtend to exaggerate the disparity between Germany andItaly (on one hand) and Great Britain (on the otherhand)

nity countries except Italy (5) Among thesesix nations Germany and Italymdashthe two coun-tries experiencing the most rapid economicchange during the post-war eramdashshould showthe greatest amount of intergenerational changein basic value priorities17

With these five predictions in mind let us ex-amine the empirical relationship between valuepreferences and age cohort within each na-tional sample (See Table 5) Our basic predic-tionmdashthat the younger cohorts will be lesslikely to show acquisitive value priorities andmore likely to show post-bourgeois valuesmdashisconfirmed strikingly Among the oldest cohortthe disproportionate preference for the pure

11 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national patternas a reaction to current events within the respectivenations There is considerable evidence of a recentlaw-and-order reaction in the face of student disordersin each of these countries But if the cross-nationaldifferences were largely the result of such a reactionwe would expect to find the emphasis on order to begreatest in France (where the recent upheaval wasgreatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had thesmallest amount of domestic disorder) The data mani-festly fail to fit this pattern we must explain them interms of predispositions anterior to rather than result-ing from the recent domestic disorders these countrieshave experienced

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Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 4: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

994 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 1 Educational Level by Age Cohort

(Percentage educated beyond primary school)

Age range ofcohort in

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

Neth

876658444025

Belg

876967503517

Italy

846043352928

France

776250393330

Germany

483929332823

Britain

473726241913

and twenty years from now if you have dataon the size of the various age-groups todayYour prediction might be upset by a major waror other catastrophe but otherwise it is likelyto be fairly accurate To take another examplelet us look at the differences in educational lev-els among the respective age cohorts in our sixnational samples (See Table 1) The differ-ences are quite sizeable reflecting the massiveexpansion of secondary and higher education inWestern Europe during the past two genera-tions These figures I would argue reflect a rel-atively enduring characteristic of the respectiveage cohorts except among the youngest groupthe level is unlikely to rise much nor is it likelyto decline for any of the cohorts The presenceof a high level of formal education may wellhave important effects on the political behaviorof a given group To the extent that such rela-tionships can be demonstrated longitudinalprojections derived from the age-cohort differ-ences are likely to be reasonably reliable

With these remarks in mind let us examinethe pattern of responses to a series of itemswhich were designed to measure an individualshierarchy of politically relevant values Repre-sentative national samples of the populationover 15 years of age in Great Britain Ger-many Belgium The Netherlands France andItaly were asked the question12

Fieldwork was carried out in February and March1970 by Louis Harris Research Ltd (London) In-stitut fur Demoskopie Allensbach) International Re-search Associates (Brussels) Netherlands Institut voorde Publieke Opinie (Amsterdam) Institut francaisdopinion publique (Paris) and Institut per le Ri-cerche Statische e 1Analisi delopinione Pubblica (Mi-lan) The respective samples had Ns of 1975 (Brit-ain) 2021 (Germany) 1298 (Belgium) 1230 (Nether-lands) 2046 (France) and 1822 (Italy)

The survey also included Luxembourg but the num-ber of respondents from that country (335) was con-sidered too small for use in the present analysis TheDutch sample has been weighed to correct for sam-pling deficiencies and the weighted N appears in thefollowing tables while the data from The Netherlandsare in the authors opinion less reliable than those

If you had to choose among the followingthings which are the two that seem most desir-able to you

Maintaining order in the nationGiving the people more say in important po-

litical decisionsFighting rising pricesProtecting freedom of speechTwo choices only were permitted thus

(aside from nonresponse and partial nonre-sponse) it was possible for a respondent to se-lect any of six possible pairs of items In rela-tion to my hypotheses two of the items (thefirst and third) were regarded as indicating tra-ditional acquisitive value preferences a con-cern with domestic order is presumed to relateabove all to the protection of property13 and

from the other countries the crucial intra-sample dif-ferences discussed in this article are sufficiently largeas to minimize the likelihood that they simply reflectsampling error On the other hand cross-national com-parisons based on the Dutch marginals should beviewed with reservations The surveys in the EuropeanCommunity countries were sponsored by the EuropeanCommunity Information Service research in GreatBritain was supported by funds from the Universityof Michigan

From the viewpoint of most of our respondentsthat is in extreme situations threats to domestic ordercan of course involve danger to ones life To theextent that a concern with ones personal safety isinvolved the item taps the need which Maslow placesimmediately below the economic needs in his hierarchyPost-bourgeois responses then are seen as reflectingsecurity in respect to both the economic and safetyneeds There is reason to expect that the intergener-ational pattern of priorities would be similar for thetwo types of needs older cohorts are more likely tohave experienced threats to their physical security aswell as to their economic security during formativeyears The persisting effect of the former experienceis suggested by the fact that older Germans are morelikely to express a fear of World War than are thepost-war cohorts see Peter Merkl Politico-CulturalRestraints on West-German Foreign Policy Com-parative Political Studies 3 (January 1971) Wedoubt that many of our respondents felt physicallythreatened in 1970 however for most this item prob-ably evokes nothing more than thoughts of propertydamage

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 995

Table 2 Pure Value Pairs by Nation

(Percentage choosing each pair within given national sample)

Pair chosen

AcquisitivePost-bourgeois

Nether

3017

Belgium

3214

Italy

3513

France

3811

Germany

4310

Britain

368

the relevance of rising prices to acquisitive mo-tivations is fairly self-evident The other twoitems in this set were regarded as indicating apreference for post-bourgeois values I usethe latter term with an awareness that politicalliberties were among the things traditionallyvalued by the bourgeoisiemdashbut with the con-viction that this group was characterized evenmore distinctively by a predominant concernfor acquiring and retaining economic goods Itis not a question of valuing one thing posi-tively and the other negatively other items inour data indicate that most people place a posi-tive value on all four of the above goals But inpolitics it is sometimes impossible to maximizeone good without detriment to another In suchcases the relative priority among valued objec-tives becomes a vital consideration Our ques-tions therefore were cast in the form offorced-choice items in an attempt to measurethese priorities Empirically it appears that al-though nearly everyone strongly favors free-dom of speech (for example) there are strik-ing differences in the priority given to it by var-ious social groups

The choice of one post-bourgeois itemshowed a relatively strong positive correlationwith the choice of the other post-bourgeoisitem in each national sample the same wastrue of the two acquisitive items Thus ap-proximately half of the respondents in eachsample chose one of the two pure pairs ofvalue preferences with the other half spreadover the four remaining mixed (or ambiva-lent) pairs plus nonresponse (See Table 2)Note that the pure acquisitive pair predomi-nates across the six samples by a ratio of atleast 3 1

On the basis of the choices made amongthese four items it is possible to classify our

We follow the Marxist tradition in according animportant role to economic determinationmdashalthoughonly within certain thresholds Both before industrial-ization and after an industrial society reaches athreshold of general economic security we believe thatother values are likely to prevail more widely Theconcept of discretionary income is analogous to ourinterpretation of the second threshold as an economyrises well above the subsistence level even specificallyeconomic behavior can be explained by economic vari-ables to a progressively diminishing extent

respondents into value-priority groups rangingfrom a pure acquisitive type to a pure post-bourgeois type with several intermediate cate-gories Use of this typology provides a simplestraightforward and intuitively meaningful basisfor analysis I should emphasize however thatthe use of these categories does not rest exclu-sively on an individuals choices among the fourgoals listed above On the contrary these fourwere selected as the basis of our typology becausethey seem to constitute a particularly sensitiveindicator of a broad range of other politicalpreferencesmdashsome of which have a fairly obvi-ous relationship to the four basic items andsome of which appear to be quite distinct interms of face content For example on the basisof the value pair chosen by a given individualone can make a fairly accurate prediction of hisresponse to the following item

Within the last couple of years there havebeen large-scale student demonstrations in (Brit-ain) and other countries In general how doyou view these Are you

mdashvery favorablemdashrather favorablemdashrather unfavorablemdashvery unfavorableTable 3 shows the respective levels of sup-

port for student demonstrations in each of thesix countries While the majority is unfavorablein each country there is a wide variation insupport levels according to the pair of valuechoices made a mean difference of fully fifty-five percentage points separates the acqui-sitive and post-bourgeois types of respon-dents In every country respondents choos-ing the pure post-bourgeois pair are thegroup most favorable to student demonstra-tions giving a heavy majority in support Over-all they are more than four times as likely tofavor the demonstrations as are the acquisi-tive respondents With only one exceptionamong the 36 value pairs shown respondentschoosing the pure acquisitive value pair areleast favorable to the student demonstrations(in the one exceptional case the acquisitiverespondents are within three percentage pointsof the least favorable group)

Factor analyses of the respective nationalsamples consistently showed these value choices

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996 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 3 Attitude Toward Student Demonstrations by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage favorable to student demonstrations)

Nation

NethItalyBelgGermFranceBritmean

Orderamp

Prices

21191814121216

Order ampFree

Speech

33292935182228

Order ampPartici-pation

42363629239

29

Prices ampFree

Speech

37423235382235

Prices ampPartici-pation

47546046416051

Free Speechamp Partici-pation

70776583666571

Overall

393635322717

Indicates the two pure value pairs on the basis of our hypothesismdashrepresenting respectively acquisitiveand post-bourgeois values

to be among the high-loading items (in a set of25 variables) on what I interpret as an acquis-itivepost-bourgeois values factor14 In everycase the choice of order and prices hadrelatively high negative loadings on this factorwhile the choice of free speech and partici-pation had relatively high positive loadings

In view of the face content of the items it isnot particularly surprising that we find a strongrelationship between these value choices andthe respondents support of or opposition tostudent demonstrations But these same valuechoices also show significant relationships withother political preferences which have no obvi-ous similarity in terms of face content For ex-ample they serve as good predictors of atti-tudes toward supranational European integra-tion Table 4 shows the relationship betweenvalue choices and responses to a three-item in-dex of support for European integration15

Other high-loading items on this factor relatedto expectations of a higher standard of living sup-port for student demonstrations support for radicalsocial change and support for a variety of proposalsfor European integration (all of which had positivepolarity) and emphasis on job security pride in onesown nationality and support for a strong nationalarmy (which had negative polarity) Because of limitedfunds the British questionnaire was shorter than theone used in the European Community countries andthe factor analysis for that sample omits some of theitems available in the larger data sets Apart fromthese omissions the British response pattern seems toparallel that found on the Continent The fact that ex-pectations of a higher future standard of living seemto go with giving a relatively low priority to economicsecurity is interesting it tends to confirm our inter-pretation that for the post-bourgeois group economicvalues are relatively unimportant because they aretaken for granted

uThis index was based on responses to the follow-ing items Supposing the people of Britain and theCommon Market were asked to decide on the follow-ing questions How would you vote

Once again we find the two theoreticallypure sets of value priorities occupying theopposite poles of the continuummdashwith post-bourgeois respondents markedly more Euro-pean in outlook than the acquisitive-type re-spondents There are only two mild exceptionsto the rule that the respondents choosing thetheoretically ambivalent value pairs are moreEuropean than the theoretically pure acquisi-tives types and less European than the post-bourgeois types The ordering within the am-bivalent pairs changes somewhat from the pat-tern we found in Table 3 with a concern forrising prices now showing a stronger associa-tion with the negative end of the scale than thepreoccupation with domestic order which for-merly held that place in other respects theranking of value pairs remains the same Over-all the post-bourgeois respondents are morethan twice as likely to be classified as clearly

mdashWould you be in favor of or against the elec-tion of a European parliament by direct universalsuffrage that is a parliament elected by all thevoters in the member countries

mdashWould you be willing to accept over and abovethe (British) government a European governmentresponsible for a common policy in foreign affairsdefense and the economy

mdashIf a President of a United States of Europewere being elected by popular vote would you bewilling to vote for a candidate not of your owncountry if his personality and programme corre-sponded more closely to your ideas than those ofthe candidates from your own country

A respondent was categorized as clearly for Euro-pean integration if he gave favorable responses to allthree of these items or to at least two of them pro-vided that his response to the third item was dontknow rather than against For a much more de-tailed exploration of this topic see my article Chang-ing Value Priorities and European Integration Journalof Common Market Studies September 1971

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 997

Table 4 Support for European Integration by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage scored as Clearly For on European Integration Index)

Nation

ItalyGermanyFranceBelgiumNetherlandsBritainmean

Pricesamp

Order

48453631281330

Prices ampFree

Speech

53573839311636

Prices ampPartici-pation

63644843341641

Order ampFree

Speech

65674846433647

Order ampPartici-pation

73596150522049

Free Speechamp Partici-

pation

69766964623261

Overall

575544423917

bull Indicates the two pure value pairs

for supranational European integration as arethe acquisitive respondents16

As we shall see presently these value choicesalso show a rather striking set of relationshipswith social structure and political party prefer-ences This is scarcely the sort of pattern whichwould emerge from random answering or froma superficial response to transient stimuli It ap-pears that these items tap a relatively well inte-grated and deep-rooted aspect of the respon-dents political orientations

If these items do tap attitudes that are earlyestablished and relatively persistent responsesto them should show distinctive patterns re-flecting distinctive conditions which prevailedduring the formative years of the respective agecohorts Our next step therefore is to examinevariations in response according to age groupBefore doing so let us attempt to specify asprecisely as possible what sort of pattern we

would expect to find on the basis of our ana-lytic framework

In the first place the most recently formedcohorts should show the highest proportion ofpost-bourgeois responses and the lowest pro-portion of acquisitive responses in every na-tional sample The respondents born after 1945constitute the only group which (as far back astheir memory reaches) has been socialized en-tirely under conditions of rising affluence unin-terrupted by major economic dislocations Asa first approximation therefore we would pre-dict that (1) the distribution of attitudesshould resemble an L-shaped curve with a verylow proportion of post-bourgeois attitudes be-ing found among respondents born before1945 and a sharp rise in the prevalence ofpost-bourgeois values among those born afterthat date conversely the occurrence of acquisi-tive values should be uniformly high among all

10 There is a certain similarity between the configura-tion of post-bourgeois preferences and the well-known concept of authoritarianism Both conceptsrelate to the priorities one gives to liberty as opposedto order Andmdashas we have just seenmdashthe libertarianposition seems linked with internationalism This fol-lows from the fact that according to our analysis thepost-bourgeois groups have attained security in regardto both the safety and sustenance needs insofar asthe nation-state is seen as a bulwark protecting theindividual against foreign threats it is less important topost-bourgeois respondents They have moreover alarger amount of venture capital psychically speak-ing available to invest in projects having an intel-lectual and esthetic appealmdashsuch as European unifica-tion There are both theoretical and empirical differ-ences between our position and that prevailing in theauthoritarianism literature We emphasize a process ofhistorically-shaped causation which is not necessarilyincompatible with but certainly takes a different focusfrom the psychodynamics of authoritarianism Em-pirically authoritarianism like acquisitive value pri-orities tends to be linked with lower economic statusBy contrast there are indications that children andyouth tend to be more authoritarian than adults

(Stouffer however reported evidence of sizeable age-group differences among adult groups in degree ofTolerance for Non-Conformity with young adultsfar more tolerant than older adults he sees the evi-dence as reflecting both life-cycle and intergenerationaleffects See Samuel Stouffer Communism Conformityand Civil Liberties [New York Doubleday 1955]p 89) In any event neither previous explorations northe present surveys revealed reasonably strong or con-sistent relationships between standardized F-scale itemsand the attitudes reported here The two concepts seemrelated but items which served as indicators of au-thoritarianism in earlier research appear to havelimited applicability in the Europe of the 1970s Fora report of an earlier cross-national exploration ofauthoritarianism and internationalism see RonaldInglehart The New Europeans Inward or OutwardLooking International Organization Vol 24 No 1(Winter 1970) pp 129-139 The literature on au-thoritarianism is immense the classic work is TheodorW Adomo et a The Authoritarian Personality (NewYork Harper 1950) Cf Richard Christie and MarieJahoda eds Studies in the Scope and Method ofThe Authoritarian Personality (Glencoe Free Press1954)

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The American Political Science Review Vol 65

1920 8938 1950 I960 1970

US I US I US JUS

I Brit BSwe HSwe iswe

[Brit JSwitz |Ger

bullDen VSwitz

Brit j^Fr

I Den

Nor

Belg

Neth

Brit

|

Figure 1 The decline in Britains relative economic position The US and major European countriesranked according to per capita Gross National Product 1900 to 1970 (Source The Economist Sep-tember 5 1970 p 69)

cohorts bom before 1945 with a precipitatedrop as we reach the postwar cohorts This pat-tern can only serve as a first approximation ofcourse It would be ridiculous to argue that nochange in basic values can occur during adultlife our point is simply that the probability ofsuch change becomes much lower after onereaches adulthood and probably continues todecline thereafter To the extent that adult re-learning takes place it would tend to smoothout the basic L-shaped curve The fact thatvalue preferences probably crystallize in differ-ent individuals at somewhat different ageswould also tend to have this effect

We would not expect to find a zero incidenceof post-bourgeois values even among the oldestcohorts there has always been at least a smallstratum of economically secure individuals

able to give top priority to nonacquisitive val-ues But this stratum should be smallest amongthe oldest cohorts if indeed it tends to reflectthe level of affluence prevailing within a givensociety during a given cohorts pre-adult years

By the same token the distribution of thesevalue preferences should vary cross-nationallyin a predictable fashionmdashreflecting the eco-nomic history of the given nation Fortunatelyfor our analysis there are substantial differ-ences in the 20th-century economic experiencesof the nations in our sample These variationsenable us to make predictions about the rela-tive level and steepness of the value-distributioncurves for given nations To put it briefly highabsolute levels of wealth in a given nation at agiven time would predict relatively high pro-portions of post-bourgeois respondents among

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 999

the cohorts socialized under those conditionshigh rates of growth for a given country wouldpredict relatively large increases in the propor-tion of post-bourgeois respondents across thatnations age-groups The economic progress ofGreat Britain in particular shows a sharp con-trast with that of the other five nationsThroughout the first four decades of the 20thcentury Britainmdashthe home of the first Indus-trial Revolutionmdashwas by far the wealthiestcountry in Europe and in world wide compari-sons it ranked second only to the US (andsometimes Canada) in per capita income Dur-ing the decade before World War II among thenations in our sample The Netherlands rankedclosest to Britain (with a per capita income 71per cent as high as the British) followed byFrance Belgium and Germany with Italy farbehind (having only 27 per cent the per capitaincome of Britain) In the postwar era the eco-nomically privileged position which Britain hadlong enjoyed began to deteriorate rapidly (seeFigure 1) Although her absolute level of incomerose gradually (interrupted by periods of stag-nation) Britain was overtaken by one after an-other of her European neighborsmdashnearly all ofwhich experienced much more rapid and con-tinuous economic growth these growth rateswere particularly steep in the case of Germanyand Italy (see Figure 2) By 1970 Britain hadbeen outstripped by five of the six EuropeanCommunity countries with the sixth (Italy)not far behind

On the basis of these historical data we canmake four predictions about the expectedvalue-distribution curves in addition to the re-shaped curve posited earlier in our first predic-tion (2) Among those respondents whoreached adulthood before World War II thesize of the stratum which had known economicsecurity during its formative years would besmallmdashbut its relative size should be greater inthe British sample than in the other nationalsamples Translated into expected survey re-sults this means that the British cohorts now intheir mid-50s or older should show the highestfrequency of post-bourgeois values (3) Therate of value change found in Britain howevershould be much lower than that in the otherfive countries Her economic growth rate sinceWorld War II has been approximately half thatof the average among the European Communitycountries as a first approximation we mightexpect the rate of increase in post-bourgeoisvalues found among Britains younger cohortsto be half as great as that within the EEC (4)In prevalence of post-bourgeois values amongthe younger cohorts we might expect Britain tobe outstripped by all of the European Commu-

320

300

280

2S0

240

220

200

ISO

160

140

120

100

Italy

UnitedKingdom

1953 IS58 1963 1968

Figure 2 Economic growth 1953-68 Based onindices of industrial production (1953 = 100)Source UN Statistical Yearbook 1969

The year 1953 is taken as our base line to avoid givingundue prominence to recovery from the devastation olWorld War II using 1948 or 1945 as a base wouldtend to exaggerate the disparity between Germany andItaly (on one hand) and Great Britain (on the otherhand)

nity countries except Italy (5) Among thesesix nations Germany and Italymdashthe two coun-tries experiencing the most rapid economicchange during the post-war eramdashshould showthe greatest amount of intergenerational changein basic value priorities17

With these five predictions in mind let us ex-amine the empirical relationship between valuepreferences and age cohort within each na-tional sample (See Table 5) Our basic predic-tionmdashthat the younger cohorts will be lesslikely to show acquisitive value priorities andmore likely to show post-bourgeois valuesmdashisconfirmed strikingly Among the oldest cohortthe disproportionate preference for the pure

11 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national patternas a reaction to current events within the respectivenations There is considerable evidence of a recentlaw-and-order reaction in the face of student disordersin each of these countries But if the cross-nationaldifferences were largely the result of such a reactionwe would expect to find the emphasis on order to begreatest in France (where the recent upheaval wasgreatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had thesmallest amount of domestic disorder) The data mani-festly fail to fit this pattern we must explain them interms of predispositions anterior to rather than result-ing from the recent domestic disorders these countrieshave experienced

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JOOO The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1005

tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 5: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 995

Table 2 Pure Value Pairs by Nation

(Percentage choosing each pair within given national sample)

Pair chosen

AcquisitivePost-bourgeois

Nether

3017

Belgium

3214

Italy

3513

France

3811

Germany

4310

Britain

368

the relevance of rising prices to acquisitive mo-tivations is fairly self-evident The other twoitems in this set were regarded as indicating apreference for post-bourgeois values I usethe latter term with an awareness that politicalliberties were among the things traditionallyvalued by the bourgeoisiemdashbut with the con-viction that this group was characterized evenmore distinctively by a predominant concernfor acquiring and retaining economic goods Itis not a question of valuing one thing posi-tively and the other negatively other items inour data indicate that most people place a posi-tive value on all four of the above goals But inpolitics it is sometimes impossible to maximizeone good without detriment to another In suchcases the relative priority among valued objec-tives becomes a vital consideration Our ques-tions therefore were cast in the form offorced-choice items in an attempt to measurethese priorities Empirically it appears that al-though nearly everyone strongly favors free-dom of speech (for example) there are strik-ing differences in the priority given to it by var-ious social groups

The choice of one post-bourgeois itemshowed a relatively strong positive correlationwith the choice of the other post-bourgeoisitem in each national sample the same wastrue of the two acquisitive items Thus ap-proximately half of the respondents in eachsample chose one of the two pure pairs ofvalue preferences with the other half spreadover the four remaining mixed (or ambiva-lent) pairs plus nonresponse (See Table 2)Note that the pure acquisitive pair predomi-nates across the six samples by a ratio of atleast 3 1

On the basis of the choices made amongthese four items it is possible to classify our

We follow the Marxist tradition in according animportant role to economic determinationmdashalthoughonly within certain thresholds Both before industrial-ization and after an industrial society reaches athreshold of general economic security we believe thatother values are likely to prevail more widely Theconcept of discretionary income is analogous to ourinterpretation of the second threshold as an economyrises well above the subsistence level even specificallyeconomic behavior can be explained by economic vari-ables to a progressively diminishing extent

respondents into value-priority groups rangingfrom a pure acquisitive type to a pure post-bourgeois type with several intermediate cate-gories Use of this typology provides a simplestraightforward and intuitively meaningful basisfor analysis I should emphasize however thatthe use of these categories does not rest exclu-sively on an individuals choices among the fourgoals listed above On the contrary these fourwere selected as the basis of our typology becausethey seem to constitute a particularly sensitiveindicator of a broad range of other politicalpreferencesmdashsome of which have a fairly obvi-ous relationship to the four basic items andsome of which appear to be quite distinct interms of face content For example on the basisof the value pair chosen by a given individualone can make a fairly accurate prediction of hisresponse to the following item

Within the last couple of years there havebeen large-scale student demonstrations in (Brit-ain) and other countries In general how doyou view these Are you

mdashvery favorablemdashrather favorablemdashrather unfavorablemdashvery unfavorableTable 3 shows the respective levels of sup-

port for student demonstrations in each of thesix countries While the majority is unfavorablein each country there is a wide variation insupport levels according to the pair of valuechoices made a mean difference of fully fifty-five percentage points separates the acqui-sitive and post-bourgeois types of respon-dents In every country respondents choos-ing the pure post-bourgeois pair are thegroup most favorable to student demonstra-tions giving a heavy majority in support Over-all they are more than four times as likely tofavor the demonstrations as are the acquisi-tive respondents With only one exceptionamong the 36 value pairs shown respondentschoosing the pure acquisitive value pair areleast favorable to the student demonstrations(in the one exceptional case the acquisitiverespondents are within three percentage pointsof the least favorable group)

Factor analyses of the respective nationalsamples consistently showed these value choices

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996 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 3 Attitude Toward Student Demonstrations by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage favorable to student demonstrations)

Nation

NethItalyBelgGermFranceBritmean

Orderamp

Prices

21191814121216

Order ampFree

Speech

33292935182228

Order ampPartici-pation

42363629239

29

Prices ampFree

Speech

37423235382235

Prices ampPartici-pation

47546046416051

Free Speechamp Partici-pation

70776583666571

Overall

393635322717

Indicates the two pure value pairs on the basis of our hypothesismdashrepresenting respectively acquisitiveand post-bourgeois values

to be among the high-loading items (in a set of25 variables) on what I interpret as an acquis-itivepost-bourgeois values factor14 In everycase the choice of order and prices hadrelatively high negative loadings on this factorwhile the choice of free speech and partici-pation had relatively high positive loadings

In view of the face content of the items it isnot particularly surprising that we find a strongrelationship between these value choices andthe respondents support of or opposition tostudent demonstrations But these same valuechoices also show significant relationships withother political preferences which have no obvi-ous similarity in terms of face content For ex-ample they serve as good predictors of atti-tudes toward supranational European integra-tion Table 4 shows the relationship betweenvalue choices and responses to a three-item in-dex of support for European integration15

Other high-loading items on this factor relatedto expectations of a higher standard of living sup-port for student demonstrations support for radicalsocial change and support for a variety of proposalsfor European integration (all of which had positivepolarity) and emphasis on job security pride in onesown nationality and support for a strong nationalarmy (which had negative polarity) Because of limitedfunds the British questionnaire was shorter than theone used in the European Community countries andthe factor analysis for that sample omits some of theitems available in the larger data sets Apart fromthese omissions the British response pattern seems toparallel that found on the Continent The fact that ex-pectations of a higher future standard of living seemto go with giving a relatively low priority to economicsecurity is interesting it tends to confirm our inter-pretation that for the post-bourgeois group economicvalues are relatively unimportant because they aretaken for granted

uThis index was based on responses to the follow-ing items Supposing the people of Britain and theCommon Market were asked to decide on the follow-ing questions How would you vote

Once again we find the two theoreticallypure sets of value priorities occupying theopposite poles of the continuummdashwith post-bourgeois respondents markedly more Euro-pean in outlook than the acquisitive-type re-spondents There are only two mild exceptionsto the rule that the respondents choosing thetheoretically ambivalent value pairs are moreEuropean than the theoretically pure acquisi-tives types and less European than the post-bourgeois types The ordering within the am-bivalent pairs changes somewhat from the pat-tern we found in Table 3 with a concern forrising prices now showing a stronger associa-tion with the negative end of the scale than thepreoccupation with domestic order which for-merly held that place in other respects theranking of value pairs remains the same Over-all the post-bourgeois respondents are morethan twice as likely to be classified as clearly

mdashWould you be in favor of or against the elec-tion of a European parliament by direct universalsuffrage that is a parliament elected by all thevoters in the member countries

mdashWould you be willing to accept over and abovethe (British) government a European governmentresponsible for a common policy in foreign affairsdefense and the economy

mdashIf a President of a United States of Europewere being elected by popular vote would you bewilling to vote for a candidate not of your owncountry if his personality and programme corre-sponded more closely to your ideas than those ofthe candidates from your own country

A respondent was categorized as clearly for Euro-pean integration if he gave favorable responses to allthree of these items or to at least two of them pro-vided that his response to the third item was dontknow rather than against For a much more de-tailed exploration of this topic see my article Chang-ing Value Priorities and European Integration Journalof Common Market Studies September 1971

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 997

Table 4 Support for European Integration by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage scored as Clearly For on European Integration Index)

Nation

ItalyGermanyFranceBelgiumNetherlandsBritainmean

Pricesamp

Order

48453631281330

Prices ampFree

Speech

53573839311636

Prices ampPartici-pation

63644843341641

Order ampFree

Speech

65674846433647

Order ampPartici-pation

73596150522049

Free Speechamp Partici-

pation

69766964623261

Overall

575544423917

bull Indicates the two pure value pairs

for supranational European integration as arethe acquisitive respondents16

As we shall see presently these value choicesalso show a rather striking set of relationshipswith social structure and political party prefer-ences This is scarcely the sort of pattern whichwould emerge from random answering or froma superficial response to transient stimuli It ap-pears that these items tap a relatively well inte-grated and deep-rooted aspect of the respon-dents political orientations

If these items do tap attitudes that are earlyestablished and relatively persistent responsesto them should show distinctive patterns re-flecting distinctive conditions which prevailedduring the formative years of the respective agecohorts Our next step therefore is to examinevariations in response according to age groupBefore doing so let us attempt to specify asprecisely as possible what sort of pattern we

would expect to find on the basis of our ana-lytic framework

In the first place the most recently formedcohorts should show the highest proportion ofpost-bourgeois responses and the lowest pro-portion of acquisitive responses in every na-tional sample The respondents born after 1945constitute the only group which (as far back astheir memory reaches) has been socialized en-tirely under conditions of rising affluence unin-terrupted by major economic dislocations Asa first approximation therefore we would pre-dict that (1) the distribution of attitudesshould resemble an L-shaped curve with a verylow proportion of post-bourgeois attitudes be-ing found among respondents born before1945 and a sharp rise in the prevalence ofpost-bourgeois values among those born afterthat date conversely the occurrence of acquisi-tive values should be uniformly high among all

10 There is a certain similarity between the configura-tion of post-bourgeois preferences and the well-known concept of authoritarianism Both conceptsrelate to the priorities one gives to liberty as opposedto order Andmdashas we have just seenmdashthe libertarianposition seems linked with internationalism This fol-lows from the fact that according to our analysis thepost-bourgeois groups have attained security in regardto both the safety and sustenance needs insofar asthe nation-state is seen as a bulwark protecting theindividual against foreign threats it is less important topost-bourgeois respondents They have moreover alarger amount of venture capital psychically speak-ing available to invest in projects having an intel-lectual and esthetic appealmdashsuch as European unifica-tion There are both theoretical and empirical differ-ences between our position and that prevailing in theauthoritarianism literature We emphasize a process ofhistorically-shaped causation which is not necessarilyincompatible with but certainly takes a different focusfrom the psychodynamics of authoritarianism Em-pirically authoritarianism like acquisitive value pri-orities tends to be linked with lower economic statusBy contrast there are indications that children andyouth tend to be more authoritarian than adults

(Stouffer however reported evidence of sizeable age-group differences among adult groups in degree ofTolerance for Non-Conformity with young adultsfar more tolerant than older adults he sees the evi-dence as reflecting both life-cycle and intergenerationaleffects See Samuel Stouffer Communism Conformityand Civil Liberties [New York Doubleday 1955]p 89) In any event neither previous explorations northe present surveys revealed reasonably strong or con-sistent relationships between standardized F-scale itemsand the attitudes reported here The two concepts seemrelated but items which served as indicators of au-thoritarianism in earlier research appear to havelimited applicability in the Europe of the 1970s Fora report of an earlier cross-national exploration ofauthoritarianism and internationalism see RonaldInglehart The New Europeans Inward or OutwardLooking International Organization Vol 24 No 1(Winter 1970) pp 129-139 The literature on au-thoritarianism is immense the classic work is TheodorW Adomo et a The Authoritarian Personality (NewYork Harper 1950) Cf Richard Christie and MarieJahoda eds Studies in the Scope and Method ofThe Authoritarian Personality (Glencoe Free Press1954)

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The American Political Science Review Vol 65

1920 8938 1950 I960 1970

US I US I US JUS

I Brit BSwe HSwe iswe

[Brit JSwitz |Ger

bullDen VSwitz

Brit j^Fr

I Den

Nor

Belg

Neth

Brit

|

Figure 1 The decline in Britains relative economic position The US and major European countriesranked according to per capita Gross National Product 1900 to 1970 (Source The Economist Sep-tember 5 1970 p 69)

cohorts bom before 1945 with a precipitatedrop as we reach the postwar cohorts This pat-tern can only serve as a first approximation ofcourse It would be ridiculous to argue that nochange in basic values can occur during adultlife our point is simply that the probability ofsuch change becomes much lower after onereaches adulthood and probably continues todecline thereafter To the extent that adult re-learning takes place it would tend to smoothout the basic L-shaped curve The fact thatvalue preferences probably crystallize in differ-ent individuals at somewhat different ageswould also tend to have this effect

We would not expect to find a zero incidenceof post-bourgeois values even among the oldestcohorts there has always been at least a smallstratum of economically secure individuals

able to give top priority to nonacquisitive val-ues But this stratum should be smallest amongthe oldest cohorts if indeed it tends to reflectthe level of affluence prevailing within a givensociety during a given cohorts pre-adult years

By the same token the distribution of thesevalue preferences should vary cross-nationallyin a predictable fashionmdashreflecting the eco-nomic history of the given nation Fortunatelyfor our analysis there are substantial differ-ences in the 20th-century economic experiencesof the nations in our sample These variationsenable us to make predictions about the rela-tive level and steepness of the value-distributioncurves for given nations To put it briefly highabsolute levels of wealth in a given nation at agiven time would predict relatively high pro-portions of post-bourgeois respondents among

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the cohorts socialized under those conditionshigh rates of growth for a given country wouldpredict relatively large increases in the propor-tion of post-bourgeois respondents across thatnations age-groups The economic progress ofGreat Britain in particular shows a sharp con-trast with that of the other five nationsThroughout the first four decades of the 20thcentury Britainmdashthe home of the first Indus-trial Revolutionmdashwas by far the wealthiestcountry in Europe and in world wide compari-sons it ranked second only to the US (andsometimes Canada) in per capita income Dur-ing the decade before World War II among thenations in our sample The Netherlands rankedclosest to Britain (with a per capita income 71per cent as high as the British) followed byFrance Belgium and Germany with Italy farbehind (having only 27 per cent the per capitaincome of Britain) In the postwar era the eco-nomically privileged position which Britain hadlong enjoyed began to deteriorate rapidly (seeFigure 1) Although her absolute level of incomerose gradually (interrupted by periods of stag-nation) Britain was overtaken by one after an-other of her European neighborsmdashnearly all ofwhich experienced much more rapid and con-tinuous economic growth these growth rateswere particularly steep in the case of Germanyand Italy (see Figure 2) By 1970 Britain hadbeen outstripped by five of the six EuropeanCommunity countries with the sixth (Italy)not far behind

On the basis of these historical data we canmake four predictions about the expectedvalue-distribution curves in addition to the re-shaped curve posited earlier in our first predic-tion (2) Among those respondents whoreached adulthood before World War II thesize of the stratum which had known economicsecurity during its formative years would besmallmdashbut its relative size should be greater inthe British sample than in the other nationalsamples Translated into expected survey re-sults this means that the British cohorts now intheir mid-50s or older should show the highestfrequency of post-bourgeois values (3) Therate of value change found in Britain howevershould be much lower than that in the otherfive countries Her economic growth rate sinceWorld War II has been approximately half thatof the average among the European Communitycountries as a first approximation we mightexpect the rate of increase in post-bourgeoisvalues found among Britains younger cohortsto be half as great as that within the EEC (4)In prevalence of post-bourgeois values amongthe younger cohorts we might expect Britain tobe outstripped by all of the European Commu-

320

300

280

2S0

240

220

200

ISO

160

140

120

100

Italy

UnitedKingdom

1953 IS58 1963 1968

Figure 2 Economic growth 1953-68 Based onindices of industrial production (1953 = 100)Source UN Statistical Yearbook 1969

The year 1953 is taken as our base line to avoid givingundue prominence to recovery from the devastation olWorld War II using 1948 or 1945 as a base wouldtend to exaggerate the disparity between Germany andItaly (on one hand) and Great Britain (on the otherhand)

nity countries except Italy (5) Among thesesix nations Germany and Italymdashthe two coun-tries experiencing the most rapid economicchange during the post-war eramdashshould showthe greatest amount of intergenerational changein basic value priorities17

With these five predictions in mind let us ex-amine the empirical relationship between valuepreferences and age cohort within each na-tional sample (See Table 5) Our basic predic-tionmdashthat the younger cohorts will be lesslikely to show acquisitive value priorities andmore likely to show post-bourgeois valuesmdashisconfirmed strikingly Among the oldest cohortthe disproportionate preference for the pure

11 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national patternas a reaction to current events within the respectivenations There is considerable evidence of a recentlaw-and-order reaction in the face of student disordersin each of these countries But if the cross-nationaldifferences were largely the result of such a reactionwe would expect to find the emphasis on order to begreatest in France (where the recent upheaval wasgreatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had thesmallest amount of domestic disorder) The data mani-festly fail to fit this pattern we must explain them interms of predispositions anterior to rather than result-ing from the recent domestic disorders these countrieshave experienced

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Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1005

tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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996 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 3 Attitude Toward Student Demonstrations by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage favorable to student demonstrations)

Nation

NethItalyBelgGermFranceBritmean

Orderamp

Prices

21191814121216

Order ampFree

Speech

33292935182228

Order ampPartici-pation

42363629239

29

Prices ampFree

Speech

37423235382235

Prices ampPartici-pation

47546046416051

Free Speechamp Partici-pation

70776583666571

Overall

393635322717

Indicates the two pure value pairs on the basis of our hypothesismdashrepresenting respectively acquisitiveand post-bourgeois values

to be among the high-loading items (in a set of25 variables) on what I interpret as an acquis-itivepost-bourgeois values factor14 In everycase the choice of order and prices hadrelatively high negative loadings on this factorwhile the choice of free speech and partici-pation had relatively high positive loadings

In view of the face content of the items it isnot particularly surprising that we find a strongrelationship between these value choices andthe respondents support of or opposition tostudent demonstrations But these same valuechoices also show significant relationships withother political preferences which have no obvi-ous similarity in terms of face content For ex-ample they serve as good predictors of atti-tudes toward supranational European integra-tion Table 4 shows the relationship betweenvalue choices and responses to a three-item in-dex of support for European integration15

Other high-loading items on this factor relatedto expectations of a higher standard of living sup-port for student demonstrations support for radicalsocial change and support for a variety of proposalsfor European integration (all of which had positivepolarity) and emphasis on job security pride in onesown nationality and support for a strong nationalarmy (which had negative polarity) Because of limitedfunds the British questionnaire was shorter than theone used in the European Community countries andthe factor analysis for that sample omits some of theitems available in the larger data sets Apart fromthese omissions the British response pattern seems toparallel that found on the Continent The fact that ex-pectations of a higher future standard of living seemto go with giving a relatively low priority to economicsecurity is interesting it tends to confirm our inter-pretation that for the post-bourgeois group economicvalues are relatively unimportant because they aretaken for granted

uThis index was based on responses to the follow-ing items Supposing the people of Britain and theCommon Market were asked to decide on the follow-ing questions How would you vote

Once again we find the two theoreticallypure sets of value priorities occupying theopposite poles of the continuummdashwith post-bourgeois respondents markedly more Euro-pean in outlook than the acquisitive-type re-spondents There are only two mild exceptionsto the rule that the respondents choosing thetheoretically ambivalent value pairs are moreEuropean than the theoretically pure acquisi-tives types and less European than the post-bourgeois types The ordering within the am-bivalent pairs changes somewhat from the pat-tern we found in Table 3 with a concern forrising prices now showing a stronger associa-tion with the negative end of the scale than thepreoccupation with domestic order which for-merly held that place in other respects theranking of value pairs remains the same Over-all the post-bourgeois respondents are morethan twice as likely to be classified as clearly

mdashWould you be in favor of or against the elec-tion of a European parliament by direct universalsuffrage that is a parliament elected by all thevoters in the member countries

mdashWould you be willing to accept over and abovethe (British) government a European governmentresponsible for a common policy in foreign affairsdefense and the economy

mdashIf a President of a United States of Europewere being elected by popular vote would you bewilling to vote for a candidate not of your owncountry if his personality and programme corre-sponded more closely to your ideas than those ofthe candidates from your own country

A respondent was categorized as clearly for Euro-pean integration if he gave favorable responses to allthree of these items or to at least two of them pro-vided that his response to the third item was dontknow rather than against For a much more de-tailed exploration of this topic see my article Chang-ing Value Priorities and European Integration Journalof Common Market Studies September 1971

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 997

Table 4 Support for European Integration by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage scored as Clearly For on European Integration Index)

Nation

ItalyGermanyFranceBelgiumNetherlandsBritainmean

Pricesamp

Order

48453631281330

Prices ampFree

Speech

53573839311636

Prices ampPartici-pation

63644843341641

Order ampFree

Speech

65674846433647

Order ampPartici-pation

73596150522049

Free Speechamp Partici-

pation

69766964623261

Overall

575544423917

bull Indicates the two pure value pairs

for supranational European integration as arethe acquisitive respondents16

As we shall see presently these value choicesalso show a rather striking set of relationshipswith social structure and political party prefer-ences This is scarcely the sort of pattern whichwould emerge from random answering or froma superficial response to transient stimuli It ap-pears that these items tap a relatively well inte-grated and deep-rooted aspect of the respon-dents political orientations

If these items do tap attitudes that are earlyestablished and relatively persistent responsesto them should show distinctive patterns re-flecting distinctive conditions which prevailedduring the formative years of the respective agecohorts Our next step therefore is to examinevariations in response according to age groupBefore doing so let us attempt to specify asprecisely as possible what sort of pattern we

would expect to find on the basis of our ana-lytic framework

In the first place the most recently formedcohorts should show the highest proportion ofpost-bourgeois responses and the lowest pro-portion of acquisitive responses in every na-tional sample The respondents born after 1945constitute the only group which (as far back astheir memory reaches) has been socialized en-tirely under conditions of rising affluence unin-terrupted by major economic dislocations Asa first approximation therefore we would pre-dict that (1) the distribution of attitudesshould resemble an L-shaped curve with a verylow proportion of post-bourgeois attitudes be-ing found among respondents born before1945 and a sharp rise in the prevalence ofpost-bourgeois values among those born afterthat date conversely the occurrence of acquisi-tive values should be uniformly high among all

10 There is a certain similarity between the configura-tion of post-bourgeois preferences and the well-known concept of authoritarianism Both conceptsrelate to the priorities one gives to liberty as opposedto order Andmdashas we have just seenmdashthe libertarianposition seems linked with internationalism This fol-lows from the fact that according to our analysis thepost-bourgeois groups have attained security in regardto both the safety and sustenance needs insofar asthe nation-state is seen as a bulwark protecting theindividual against foreign threats it is less important topost-bourgeois respondents They have moreover alarger amount of venture capital psychically speak-ing available to invest in projects having an intel-lectual and esthetic appealmdashsuch as European unifica-tion There are both theoretical and empirical differ-ences between our position and that prevailing in theauthoritarianism literature We emphasize a process ofhistorically-shaped causation which is not necessarilyincompatible with but certainly takes a different focusfrom the psychodynamics of authoritarianism Em-pirically authoritarianism like acquisitive value pri-orities tends to be linked with lower economic statusBy contrast there are indications that children andyouth tend to be more authoritarian than adults

(Stouffer however reported evidence of sizeable age-group differences among adult groups in degree ofTolerance for Non-Conformity with young adultsfar more tolerant than older adults he sees the evi-dence as reflecting both life-cycle and intergenerationaleffects See Samuel Stouffer Communism Conformityand Civil Liberties [New York Doubleday 1955]p 89) In any event neither previous explorations northe present surveys revealed reasonably strong or con-sistent relationships between standardized F-scale itemsand the attitudes reported here The two concepts seemrelated but items which served as indicators of au-thoritarianism in earlier research appear to havelimited applicability in the Europe of the 1970s Fora report of an earlier cross-national exploration ofauthoritarianism and internationalism see RonaldInglehart The New Europeans Inward or OutwardLooking International Organization Vol 24 No 1(Winter 1970) pp 129-139 The literature on au-thoritarianism is immense the classic work is TheodorW Adomo et a The Authoritarian Personality (NewYork Harper 1950) Cf Richard Christie and MarieJahoda eds Studies in the Scope and Method ofThe Authoritarian Personality (Glencoe Free Press1954)

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The American Political Science Review Vol 65

1920 8938 1950 I960 1970

US I US I US JUS

I Brit BSwe HSwe iswe

[Brit JSwitz |Ger

bullDen VSwitz

Brit j^Fr

I Den

Nor

Belg

Neth

Brit

|

Figure 1 The decline in Britains relative economic position The US and major European countriesranked according to per capita Gross National Product 1900 to 1970 (Source The Economist Sep-tember 5 1970 p 69)

cohorts bom before 1945 with a precipitatedrop as we reach the postwar cohorts This pat-tern can only serve as a first approximation ofcourse It would be ridiculous to argue that nochange in basic values can occur during adultlife our point is simply that the probability ofsuch change becomes much lower after onereaches adulthood and probably continues todecline thereafter To the extent that adult re-learning takes place it would tend to smoothout the basic L-shaped curve The fact thatvalue preferences probably crystallize in differ-ent individuals at somewhat different ageswould also tend to have this effect

We would not expect to find a zero incidenceof post-bourgeois values even among the oldestcohorts there has always been at least a smallstratum of economically secure individuals

able to give top priority to nonacquisitive val-ues But this stratum should be smallest amongthe oldest cohorts if indeed it tends to reflectthe level of affluence prevailing within a givensociety during a given cohorts pre-adult years

By the same token the distribution of thesevalue preferences should vary cross-nationallyin a predictable fashionmdashreflecting the eco-nomic history of the given nation Fortunatelyfor our analysis there are substantial differ-ences in the 20th-century economic experiencesof the nations in our sample These variationsenable us to make predictions about the rela-tive level and steepness of the value-distributioncurves for given nations To put it briefly highabsolute levels of wealth in a given nation at agiven time would predict relatively high pro-portions of post-bourgeois respondents among

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 999

the cohorts socialized under those conditionshigh rates of growth for a given country wouldpredict relatively large increases in the propor-tion of post-bourgeois respondents across thatnations age-groups The economic progress ofGreat Britain in particular shows a sharp con-trast with that of the other five nationsThroughout the first four decades of the 20thcentury Britainmdashthe home of the first Indus-trial Revolutionmdashwas by far the wealthiestcountry in Europe and in world wide compari-sons it ranked second only to the US (andsometimes Canada) in per capita income Dur-ing the decade before World War II among thenations in our sample The Netherlands rankedclosest to Britain (with a per capita income 71per cent as high as the British) followed byFrance Belgium and Germany with Italy farbehind (having only 27 per cent the per capitaincome of Britain) In the postwar era the eco-nomically privileged position which Britain hadlong enjoyed began to deteriorate rapidly (seeFigure 1) Although her absolute level of incomerose gradually (interrupted by periods of stag-nation) Britain was overtaken by one after an-other of her European neighborsmdashnearly all ofwhich experienced much more rapid and con-tinuous economic growth these growth rateswere particularly steep in the case of Germanyand Italy (see Figure 2) By 1970 Britain hadbeen outstripped by five of the six EuropeanCommunity countries with the sixth (Italy)not far behind

On the basis of these historical data we canmake four predictions about the expectedvalue-distribution curves in addition to the re-shaped curve posited earlier in our first predic-tion (2) Among those respondents whoreached adulthood before World War II thesize of the stratum which had known economicsecurity during its formative years would besmallmdashbut its relative size should be greater inthe British sample than in the other nationalsamples Translated into expected survey re-sults this means that the British cohorts now intheir mid-50s or older should show the highestfrequency of post-bourgeois values (3) Therate of value change found in Britain howevershould be much lower than that in the otherfive countries Her economic growth rate sinceWorld War II has been approximately half thatof the average among the European Communitycountries as a first approximation we mightexpect the rate of increase in post-bourgeoisvalues found among Britains younger cohortsto be half as great as that within the EEC (4)In prevalence of post-bourgeois values amongthe younger cohorts we might expect Britain tobe outstripped by all of the European Commu-

320

300

280

2S0

240

220

200

ISO

160

140

120

100

Italy

UnitedKingdom

1953 IS58 1963 1968

Figure 2 Economic growth 1953-68 Based onindices of industrial production (1953 = 100)Source UN Statistical Yearbook 1969

The year 1953 is taken as our base line to avoid givingundue prominence to recovery from the devastation olWorld War II using 1948 or 1945 as a base wouldtend to exaggerate the disparity between Germany andItaly (on one hand) and Great Britain (on the otherhand)

nity countries except Italy (5) Among thesesix nations Germany and Italymdashthe two coun-tries experiencing the most rapid economicchange during the post-war eramdashshould showthe greatest amount of intergenerational changein basic value priorities17

With these five predictions in mind let us ex-amine the empirical relationship between valuepreferences and age cohort within each na-tional sample (See Table 5) Our basic predic-tionmdashthat the younger cohorts will be lesslikely to show acquisitive value priorities andmore likely to show post-bourgeois valuesmdashisconfirmed strikingly Among the oldest cohortthe disproportionate preference for the pure

11 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national patternas a reaction to current events within the respectivenations There is considerable evidence of a recentlaw-and-order reaction in the face of student disordersin each of these countries But if the cross-nationaldifferences were largely the result of such a reactionwe would expect to find the emphasis on order to begreatest in France (where the recent upheaval wasgreatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had thesmallest amount of domestic disorder) The data mani-festly fail to fit this pattern we must explain them interms of predispositions anterior to rather than result-ing from the recent domestic disorders these countrieshave experienced

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JOOO The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1001

ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 7: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 997

Table 4 Support for European Integration by Value Pairs Chosen

(Percentage scored as Clearly For on European Integration Index)

Nation

ItalyGermanyFranceBelgiumNetherlandsBritainmean

Pricesamp

Order

48453631281330

Prices ampFree

Speech

53573839311636

Prices ampPartici-pation

63644843341641

Order ampFree

Speech

65674846433647

Order ampPartici-pation

73596150522049

Free Speechamp Partici-

pation

69766964623261

Overall

575544423917

bull Indicates the two pure value pairs

for supranational European integration as arethe acquisitive respondents16

As we shall see presently these value choicesalso show a rather striking set of relationshipswith social structure and political party prefer-ences This is scarcely the sort of pattern whichwould emerge from random answering or froma superficial response to transient stimuli It ap-pears that these items tap a relatively well inte-grated and deep-rooted aspect of the respon-dents political orientations

If these items do tap attitudes that are earlyestablished and relatively persistent responsesto them should show distinctive patterns re-flecting distinctive conditions which prevailedduring the formative years of the respective agecohorts Our next step therefore is to examinevariations in response according to age groupBefore doing so let us attempt to specify asprecisely as possible what sort of pattern we

would expect to find on the basis of our ana-lytic framework

In the first place the most recently formedcohorts should show the highest proportion ofpost-bourgeois responses and the lowest pro-portion of acquisitive responses in every na-tional sample The respondents born after 1945constitute the only group which (as far back astheir memory reaches) has been socialized en-tirely under conditions of rising affluence unin-terrupted by major economic dislocations Asa first approximation therefore we would pre-dict that (1) the distribution of attitudesshould resemble an L-shaped curve with a verylow proportion of post-bourgeois attitudes be-ing found among respondents born before1945 and a sharp rise in the prevalence ofpost-bourgeois values among those born afterthat date conversely the occurrence of acquisi-tive values should be uniformly high among all

10 There is a certain similarity between the configura-tion of post-bourgeois preferences and the well-known concept of authoritarianism Both conceptsrelate to the priorities one gives to liberty as opposedto order Andmdashas we have just seenmdashthe libertarianposition seems linked with internationalism This fol-lows from the fact that according to our analysis thepost-bourgeois groups have attained security in regardto both the safety and sustenance needs insofar asthe nation-state is seen as a bulwark protecting theindividual against foreign threats it is less important topost-bourgeois respondents They have moreover alarger amount of venture capital psychically speak-ing available to invest in projects having an intel-lectual and esthetic appealmdashsuch as European unifica-tion There are both theoretical and empirical differ-ences between our position and that prevailing in theauthoritarianism literature We emphasize a process ofhistorically-shaped causation which is not necessarilyincompatible with but certainly takes a different focusfrom the psychodynamics of authoritarianism Em-pirically authoritarianism like acquisitive value pri-orities tends to be linked with lower economic statusBy contrast there are indications that children andyouth tend to be more authoritarian than adults

(Stouffer however reported evidence of sizeable age-group differences among adult groups in degree ofTolerance for Non-Conformity with young adultsfar more tolerant than older adults he sees the evi-dence as reflecting both life-cycle and intergenerationaleffects See Samuel Stouffer Communism Conformityand Civil Liberties [New York Doubleday 1955]p 89) In any event neither previous explorations northe present surveys revealed reasonably strong or con-sistent relationships between standardized F-scale itemsand the attitudes reported here The two concepts seemrelated but items which served as indicators of au-thoritarianism in earlier research appear to havelimited applicability in the Europe of the 1970s Fora report of an earlier cross-national exploration ofauthoritarianism and internationalism see RonaldInglehart The New Europeans Inward or OutwardLooking International Organization Vol 24 No 1(Winter 1970) pp 129-139 The literature on au-thoritarianism is immense the classic work is TheodorW Adomo et a The Authoritarian Personality (NewYork Harper 1950) Cf Richard Christie and MarieJahoda eds Studies in the Scope and Method ofThe Authoritarian Personality (Glencoe Free Press1954)

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The American Political Science Review Vol 65

1920 8938 1950 I960 1970

US I US I US JUS

I Brit BSwe HSwe iswe

[Brit JSwitz |Ger

bullDen VSwitz

Brit j^Fr

I Den

Nor

Belg

Neth

Brit

|

Figure 1 The decline in Britains relative economic position The US and major European countriesranked according to per capita Gross National Product 1900 to 1970 (Source The Economist Sep-tember 5 1970 p 69)

cohorts bom before 1945 with a precipitatedrop as we reach the postwar cohorts This pat-tern can only serve as a first approximation ofcourse It would be ridiculous to argue that nochange in basic values can occur during adultlife our point is simply that the probability ofsuch change becomes much lower after onereaches adulthood and probably continues todecline thereafter To the extent that adult re-learning takes place it would tend to smoothout the basic L-shaped curve The fact thatvalue preferences probably crystallize in differ-ent individuals at somewhat different ageswould also tend to have this effect

We would not expect to find a zero incidenceof post-bourgeois values even among the oldestcohorts there has always been at least a smallstratum of economically secure individuals

able to give top priority to nonacquisitive val-ues But this stratum should be smallest amongthe oldest cohorts if indeed it tends to reflectthe level of affluence prevailing within a givensociety during a given cohorts pre-adult years

By the same token the distribution of thesevalue preferences should vary cross-nationallyin a predictable fashionmdashreflecting the eco-nomic history of the given nation Fortunatelyfor our analysis there are substantial differ-ences in the 20th-century economic experiencesof the nations in our sample These variationsenable us to make predictions about the rela-tive level and steepness of the value-distributioncurves for given nations To put it briefly highabsolute levels of wealth in a given nation at agiven time would predict relatively high pro-portions of post-bourgeois respondents among

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 999

the cohorts socialized under those conditionshigh rates of growth for a given country wouldpredict relatively large increases in the propor-tion of post-bourgeois respondents across thatnations age-groups The economic progress ofGreat Britain in particular shows a sharp con-trast with that of the other five nationsThroughout the first four decades of the 20thcentury Britainmdashthe home of the first Indus-trial Revolutionmdashwas by far the wealthiestcountry in Europe and in world wide compari-sons it ranked second only to the US (andsometimes Canada) in per capita income Dur-ing the decade before World War II among thenations in our sample The Netherlands rankedclosest to Britain (with a per capita income 71per cent as high as the British) followed byFrance Belgium and Germany with Italy farbehind (having only 27 per cent the per capitaincome of Britain) In the postwar era the eco-nomically privileged position which Britain hadlong enjoyed began to deteriorate rapidly (seeFigure 1) Although her absolute level of incomerose gradually (interrupted by periods of stag-nation) Britain was overtaken by one after an-other of her European neighborsmdashnearly all ofwhich experienced much more rapid and con-tinuous economic growth these growth rateswere particularly steep in the case of Germanyand Italy (see Figure 2) By 1970 Britain hadbeen outstripped by five of the six EuropeanCommunity countries with the sixth (Italy)not far behind

On the basis of these historical data we canmake four predictions about the expectedvalue-distribution curves in addition to the re-shaped curve posited earlier in our first predic-tion (2) Among those respondents whoreached adulthood before World War II thesize of the stratum which had known economicsecurity during its formative years would besmallmdashbut its relative size should be greater inthe British sample than in the other nationalsamples Translated into expected survey re-sults this means that the British cohorts now intheir mid-50s or older should show the highestfrequency of post-bourgeois values (3) Therate of value change found in Britain howevershould be much lower than that in the otherfive countries Her economic growth rate sinceWorld War II has been approximately half thatof the average among the European Communitycountries as a first approximation we mightexpect the rate of increase in post-bourgeoisvalues found among Britains younger cohortsto be half as great as that within the EEC (4)In prevalence of post-bourgeois values amongthe younger cohorts we might expect Britain tobe outstripped by all of the European Commu-

320

300

280

2S0

240

220

200

ISO

160

140

120

100

Italy

UnitedKingdom

1953 IS58 1963 1968

Figure 2 Economic growth 1953-68 Based onindices of industrial production (1953 = 100)Source UN Statistical Yearbook 1969

The year 1953 is taken as our base line to avoid givingundue prominence to recovery from the devastation olWorld War II using 1948 or 1945 as a base wouldtend to exaggerate the disparity between Germany andItaly (on one hand) and Great Britain (on the otherhand)

nity countries except Italy (5) Among thesesix nations Germany and Italymdashthe two coun-tries experiencing the most rapid economicchange during the post-war eramdashshould showthe greatest amount of intergenerational changein basic value priorities17

With these five predictions in mind let us ex-amine the empirical relationship between valuepreferences and age cohort within each na-tional sample (See Table 5) Our basic predic-tionmdashthat the younger cohorts will be lesslikely to show acquisitive value priorities andmore likely to show post-bourgeois valuesmdashisconfirmed strikingly Among the oldest cohortthe disproportionate preference for the pure

11 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national patternas a reaction to current events within the respectivenations There is considerable evidence of a recentlaw-and-order reaction in the face of student disordersin each of these countries But if the cross-nationaldifferences were largely the result of such a reactionwe would expect to find the emphasis on order to begreatest in France (where the recent upheaval wasgreatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had thesmallest amount of domestic disorder) The data mani-festly fail to fit this pattern we must explain them interms of predispositions anterior to rather than result-ing from the recent domestic disorders these countrieshave experienced

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JOOO The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1001

ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 8: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

The American Political Science Review Vol 65

1920 8938 1950 I960 1970

US I US I US JUS

I Brit BSwe HSwe iswe

[Brit JSwitz |Ger

bullDen VSwitz

Brit j^Fr

I Den

Nor

Belg

Neth

Brit

|

Figure 1 The decline in Britains relative economic position The US and major European countriesranked according to per capita Gross National Product 1900 to 1970 (Source The Economist Sep-tember 5 1970 p 69)

cohorts bom before 1945 with a precipitatedrop as we reach the postwar cohorts This pat-tern can only serve as a first approximation ofcourse It would be ridiculous to argue that nochange in basic values can occur during adultlife our point is simply that the probability ofsuch change becomes much lower after onereaches adulthood and probably continues todecline thereafter To the extent that adult re-learning takes place it would tend to smoothout the basic L-shaped curve The fact thatvalue preferences probably crystallize in differ-ent individuals at somewhat different ageswould also tend to have this effect

We would not expect to find a zero incidenceof post-bourgeois values even among the oldestcohorts there has always been at least a smallstratum of economically secure individuals

able to give top priority to nonacquisitive val-ues But this stratum should be smallest amongthe oldest cohorts if indeed it tends to reflectthe level of affluence prevailing within a givensociety during a given cohorts pre-adult years

By the same token the distribution of thesevalue preferences should vary cross-nationallyin a predictable fashionmdashreflecting the eco-nomic history of the given nation Fortunatelyfor our analysis there are substantial differ-ences in the 20th-century economic experiencesof the nations in our sample These variationsenable us to make predictions about the rela-tive level and steepness of the value-distributioncurves for given nations To put it briefly highabsolute levels of wealth in a given nation at agiven time would predict relatively high pro-portions of post-bourgeois respondents among

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 999

the cohorts socialized under those conditionshigh rates of growth for a given country wouldpredict relatively large increases in the propor-tion of post-bourgeois respondents across thatnations age-groups The economic progress ofGreat Britain in particular shows a sharp con-trast with that of the other five nationsThroughout the first four decades of the 20thcentury Britainmdashthe home of the first Indus-trial Revolutionmdashwas by far the wealthiestcountry in Europe and in world wide compari-sons it ranked second only to the US (andsometimes Canada) in per capita income Dur-ing the decade before World War II among thenations in our sample The Netherlands rankedclosest to Britain (with a per capita income 71per cent as high as the British) followed byFrance Belgium and Germany with Italy farbehind (having only 27 per cent the per capitaincome of Britain) In the postwar era the eco-nomically privileged position which Britain hadlong enjoyed began to deteriorate rapidly (seeFigure 1) Although her absolute level of incomerose gradually (interrupted by periods of stag-nation) Britain was overtaken by one after an-other of her European neighborsmdashnearly all ofwhich experienced much more rapid and con-tinuous economic growth these growth rateswere particularly steep in the case of Germanyand Italy (see Figure 2) By 1970 Britain hadbeen outstripped by five of the six EuropeanCommunity countries with the sixth (Italy)not far behind

On the basis of these historical data we canmake four predictions about the expectedvalue-distribution curves in addition to the re-shaped curve posited earlier in our first predic-tion (2) Among those respondents whoreached adulthood before World War II thesize of the stratum which had known economicsecurity during its formative years would besmallmdashbut its relative size should be greater inthe British sample than in the other nationalsamples Translated into expected survey re-sults this means that the British cohorts now intheir mid-50s or older should show the highestfrequency of post-bourgeois values (3) Therate of value change found in Britain howevershould be much lower than that in the otherfive countries Her economic growth rate sinceWorld War II has been approximately half thatof the average among the European Communitycountries as a first approximation we mightexpect the rate of increase in post-bourgeoisvalues found among Britains younger cohortsto be half as great as that within the EEC (4)In prevalence of post-bourgeois values amongthe younger cohorts we might expect Britain tobe outstripped by all of the European Commu-

320

300

280

2S0

240

220

200

ISO

160

140

120

100

Italy

UnitedKingdom

1953 IS58 1963 1968

Figure 2 Economic growth 1953-68 Based onindices of industrial production (1953 = 100)Source UN Statistical Yearbook 1969

The year 1953 is taken as our base line to avoid givingundue prominence to recovery from the devastation olWorld War II using 1948 or 1945 as a base wouldtend to exaggerate the disparity between Germany andItaly (on one hand) and Great Britain (on the otherhand)

nity countries except Italy (5) Among thesesix nations Germany and Italymdashthe two coun-tries experiencing the most rapid economicchange during the post-war eramdashshould showthe greatest amount of intergenerational changein basic value priorities17

With these five predictions in mind let us ex-amine the empirical relationship between valuepreferences and age cohort within each na-tional sample (See Table 5) Our basic predic-tionmdashthat the younger cohorts will be lesslikely to show acquisitive value priorities andmore likely to show post-bourgeois valuesmdashisconfirmed strikingly Among the oldest cohortthe disproportionate preference for the pure

11 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national patternas a reaction to current events within the respectivenations There is considerable evidence of a recentlaw-and-order reaction in the face of student disordersin each of these countries But if the cross-nationaldifferences were largely the result of such a reactionwe would expect to find the emphasis on order to begreatest in France (where the recent upheaval wasgreatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had thesmallest amount of domestic disorder) The data mani-festly fail to fit this pattern we must explain them interms of predispositions anterior to rather than result-ing from the recent domestic disorders these countrieshave experienced

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JOOO The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1001

ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 9: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 999

the cohorts socialized under those conditionshigh rates of growth for a given country wouldpredict relatively large increases in the propor-tion of post-bourgeois respondents across thatnations age-groups The economic progress ofGreat Britain in particular shows a sharp con-trast with that of the other five nationsThroughout the first four decades of the 20thcentury Britainmdashthe home of the first Indus-trial Revolutionmdashwas by far the wealthiestcountry in Europe and in world wide compari-sons it ranked second only to the US (andsometimes Canada) in per capita income Dur-ing the decade before World War II among thenations in our sample The Netherlands rankedclosest to Britain (with a per capita income 71per cent as high as the British) followed byFrance Belgium and Germany with Italy farbehind (having only 27 per cent the per capitaincome of Britain) In the postwar era the eco-nomically privileged position which Britain hadlong enjoyed began to deteriorate rapidly (seeFigure 1) Although her absolute level of incomerose gradually (interrupted by periods of stag-nation) Britain was overtaken by one after an-other of her European neighborsmdashnearly all ofwhich experienced much more rapid and con-tinuous economic growth these growth rateswere particularly steep in the case of Germanyand Italy (see Figure 2) By 1970 Britain hadbeen outstripped by five of the six EuropeanCommunity countries with the sixth (Italy)not far behind

On the basis of these historical data we canmake four predictions about the expectedvalue-distribution curves in addition to the re-shaped curve posited earlier in our first predic-tion (2) Among those respondents whoreached adulthood before World War II thesize of the stratum which had known economicsecurity during its formative years would besmallmdashbut its relative size should be greater inthe British sample than in the other nationalsamples Translated into expected survey re-sults this means that the British cohorts now intheir mid-50s or older should show the highestfrequency of post-bourgeois values (3) Therate of value change found in Britain howevershould be much lower than that in the otherfive countries Her economic growth rate sinceWorld War II has been approximately half thatof the average among the European Communitycountries as a first approximation we mightexpect the rate of increase in post-bourgeoisvalues found among Britains younger cohortsto be half as great as that within the EEC (4)In prevalence of post-bourgeois values amongthe younger cohorts we might expect Britain tobe outstripped by all of the European Commu-

320

300

280

2S0

240

220

200

ISO

160

140

120

100

Italy

UnitedKingdom

1953 IS58 1963 1968

Figure 2 Economic growth 1953-68 Based onindices of industrial production (1953 = 100)Source UN Statistical Yearbook 1969

The year 1953 is taken as our base line to avoid givingundue prominence to recovery from the devastation olWorld War II using 1948 or 1945 as a base wouldtend to exaggerate the disparity between Germany andItaly (on one hand) and Great Britain (on the otherhand)

nity countries except Italy (5) Among thesesix nations Germany and Italymdashthe two coun-tries experiencing the most rapid economicchange during the post-war eramdashshould showthe greatest amount of intergenerational changein basic value priorities17

With these five predictions in mind let us ex-amine the empirical relationship between valuepreferences and age cohort within each na-tional sample (See Table 5) Our basic predic-tionmdashthat the younger cohorts will be lesslikely to show acquisitive value priorities andmore likely to show post-bourgeois valuesmdashisconfirmed strikingly Among the oldest cohortthe disproportionate preference for the pure

11 It is difficult to interpret the cross-national patternas a reaction to current events within the respectivenations There is considerable evidence of a recentlaw-and-order reaction in the face of student disordersin each of these countries But if the cross-nationaldifferences were largely the result of such a reactionwe would expect to find the emphasis on order to begreatest in France (where the recent upheaval wasgreatest) and weakest in Britain (which has had thesmallest amount of domestic disorder) The data mani-festly fail to fit this pattern we must explain them interms of predispositions anterior to rather than result-ing from the recent domestic disorders these countrieshave experienced

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Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1001

ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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1008 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1009

in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 10: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

JOOO The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 5 Pure Value Preferences by Age Cohort

(Percentage choosing each pair)

Age Range

1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

DifTcrence between

cohorts

Netherlands

Act)

202736293744

- 2 4

P-B N

29 (442)16(408)14(406)15 (285)7 (223)5 (138)

48

+24

Acq

193528293745

- 2 6

Belgium

P-B N

26 (227)13(211)19 (234)13(188)8 (201)2 (235)

50

+24

Acq

183036374254

- 3 6

Italy

P-BN

28 (335)15 (256)11(397)8 (310)7(315)4 (193)

60

+24

Acq

213536394850

-29

France

P-BN

20 (365)11(369)14 (347)10 (319)6 (280)2(366)

47

+ 18

Acq

213546476056

-35

Germany

P-BN

23 (317)15 (409)8 (372)7(326)4 (325)2(265)

56

+21

Acq

252929374150

- 2 5

Britain

P-BN

14 (254)9 (340)S (278)5 (398)8(331)5 (374)

34

+ 9

Number in parentheses is base on which percentages are calculated

acquisitive pair is overwhelming half ornearly half of the entire cohort choose that onepair out of six possibilities Most of the re-maining respondents in this cohort are ambiva-lent a relative handfulmdashin no case more thanfive per centmdashchooses the post-bourgeois set ofpriorities Overall acquisitive types outnumberpost-bourgeois types by a ratio of better than151 in this cohort As we move up the tablefrom the oldest to the youngest cohort the pro-portion choosing the pure acquisitive pairfalls off markedly diminishing by considerablymore than one-half in every sample except theBritish even in the latter case the decline isjust equal to 50 per cent As we move fromoldest to youngest the increase in the propor-tion choosing the post-bourgeois priorities isproportionately even greater even in the Brit-ish sample where the indications of changeover time are weakest the post-bourgeois pro-portion nearly triples

Moreover we do find something resemblinga modified L-shaped curve in the distribution ofthese responses across the six national sam-ples by far the biggest discontinuity occurs aswe move from the second-youngest to theyoungest cohort Even among the 25-34 year-old cohort there is still a heavy plurality of ac-quisitive types over post-bourgeois types A ma-jor shift occurs as we move to the one agecohort that has been socialized entirely in thepostwar era18 the post-bourgeois group almostdoubles in size (among the Continental sam-ples) while the acquisitive group declinessharply Within the youngest cohort the post-bourgeois group has either reached approxi-mate parity or moved ahead of the acquisitivegroupmdashexcept in Britain Although valuechange occurs across the whole range of age

Interestingly this shift corresponds to the transitionfrom the purportedly apolitical youth of the 1950smdashthe Skeptical Generation or Uncommitted Youthas they were calledmdashto the relatively radical youth ofthe 1960s

cohorts no transition is as sharp as the one as-sociated with socialization in the postwar era

Moving to cross-national comparisons wenote that our second prediction is also con-firmed Although the British sample as a wholehas the smallest proportion of post-bourgeoistypes among the cohorts who reached adult-hood before World War II (those now morethan 54 years of age) Britain shows the high-est proportion of post-bourgeois respondentsShe is very closely followed by the Dutch inthis respect (the nationality which came closestto the British level of affluence in the prewarperiod)

Our third prediction also seems to be con-firmed by the data the rate of change acrossthe British cohorts is much smaller than thatfound in any other country The total numberof points separating the oldest British cohortfrom the youngest is not much more than halfas large as the range found in the German andItalian samplesmdashwhere apparent intergenera-tional change is strongest (in keeping with ourfifth prediction)

Our fourth prediction was that among theyoungest cohorts Britain should rank behindevery country except Italy in her proportion ofpost-bourgeois respondents This expectation isamply borne out the British sample ranks farbehind all the other samplesmdashincluding theItalian which seems to be a good deal morepost-bourgeois than it should be on the basis ofeconomic expectations We will not attempt toprovide an ad hoc explanation for this anom-aly It is puzzling but on the whole the empiri-cal findings seem to correspond to expectationsdrawn from economic history remarkably well

Generational or Life-Cycle InterpretationAt this point we should consider the possibil-

ity that the observed age-group differences re-flect life-cycle factors rather than intergenera-tional change The large shift in value prefer-ences which we find as we move from the sec-

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1001

ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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1004 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1001

ond youngest to the youngest cohort is indeedwhat we would expect to find on the basis ofthe conditions which governed the formativeyears of the respective cohorts But the phenom-enon might also be interpreted in life-cycleterms the cutting point between the two agegroups corresponds roughly to the age at whichthe average individual marries and starts a fam-ily It could be argued therefore that theyoungest cohort shows a tendency toward post-bourgeois values merely because these individu-als are young and lack family responsibilitieswhen they get older they will have the samevalue priorities as the older cohorts have nowSince responses to these items seem to be rela-tively well integrated into the individuals atti-tudinal structuremdasha fact which suggests attitu-dinal stabilitymdashsuch an interpretation seemsrather unlikely The finding that the age-cohortdifferences seem to reflect the economic historyof the given nation makes the life-cycle inter-pretation still less satisfactory And when weexamine the data from still another perspectiveany simple life-cycle interpretation becomesquite implausible

As we recall my basic hypotheses predictedtwo sorts of effects associated with an ongoingtransformation of value priorities The firstwhich we have just examined relates to age-co-hort differences the second relates to differingdegrees of affluence The hypotheses suggestthat the degree of economic security an individ-ual felt during his formative years may play akey role in shaping his later political behaviorFor most of our sample it is impossible (at thislate date) to obtain a direct measure of thisvariable We do have some indirect indicatorshowever Perhaps the most accurate one is therespondents level of formal education inWestern Europe (even more than in the US)ones likelihood of obtaining a secondary oruniversity education is very closely related tothe socioeconomic status of ones family of ori-gin Insofar as it influences levels of educationand career aspirations the relative affluence of

ones parents also tends to be correlated withthe individuals own economic status To theextent that this association holds our data onthe individuals own education current occupa-tion and income should also serve as a roughindicator of the degree to which he was eco-nomically secure during his formative years(Most of the women in our sample do not haveindependent occupations for them our indica-tors are their own education and the occupa-tion of head of family)

In terms of the indicators available to usthen our prediction is that post-bourgeois val-ues should be most prevalent among those whocurrently enjoy a relatively high socioeconomicstatusmdashalthough this indicator is understood tobe important chiefly insofar as it reflects afflu-ence during ones formative years Let us testthis hypothesis Table 6 shows the distributionof value preferences according to socioeco-nomic status (ranked on the basis of a scalecombining occupation and education) Table 6summarizes the relationship between value pri-orities and socioeconomic status within the sixnational samples As predicted the lower socio-economic groups are much more likely to selectacquisitive value priorities than are the up-per socioeconomic groups overall about 42per cent of the lower socioeconomic categorychooses the theoretically pure acquisitive valuepairmdashmore than double the proportion whichmakes that choice among the two highestsocioeconomic categories Conversely the up-per socioeconomic categories are much morelikely to choose the post-bourgeois set of valuepriorities Once again Britain tends to be a de-viant case her social class differences (like herage-cohort differences) are smaller than thosein the other countries

On the whole the relationship between agecohort and value priorities persists when wecontrol for socioeconomic status (see Table 7)Despite the presence of some anomalies (espe-cially in the Dutch sample) the predominantpattern is that the percentage choosing acquisi-

Table 6 Value Preferences by Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

SocioeconomicStatus

Lower SESMiddle SESUpper Middle SESUpper SES

Netherlands

Acq

40291611

P-B N

7(551)20 (526)30 (365)52 (66)

Belgium

Acq

38332417

P-B N

6(486)15 (353)20 (86)35 (95)

Acq

38301818

Italy

P-B N

10 (995)14 (331)32 (105)27 (135)

France

Acq

47352914

P-B N

4 (908)11(626)15 (369)42 (143)

Germany

Acq

49382316

P-B N

7(1319)11 (510)26 (139)44 (44)

Acq

37402825

Britain

P-B N

6(1179)8 (459)

10 (261)15 (73)

bull Upper SES Group includes respondents from Modem Middle class backgrounds having university educations (see footnote 9 forour definition of the Modern Middle Class) Upper Middle SES includes members of that class having a secondary level of educa-tion Middle SES includes respondents from other occupational backgrounds (including traditional middle class) educated beyondthe primary level

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1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1003

Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1005

tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 12: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1002 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

tive priorities declines sharply and the percent-age choosing post-bourgeois priorities risessharply as we move from oldest to youngestcohorts Perhaps the most significant aspect ofTable 7 is the extent to which it tends to refutea life-cycle interpretation of the observed age-group differences to uphold such an interpreta-tion we would have to posit the existence oftotally different Life cycles for working-classand middle-class respondents To be sureworking-class youth tend to enter the workforce and marry earlier than their middle-classpeersmdashbut in terms of value priorities the twoclasses are out of phase not just by four or fiveyears but by nearly a generation Within theyoungest Dutch cohort for example the uppersocioeconomic categories choose post-bourgeoispriorities over acquisitive priorities by a ratioof 506 while 43 per cent of their lower socio-economic peers choose acquisitive valuesmdashwithnone making post-bourgeois choices In theBelgian sample the corresponding ratios are3512 within the upper middle and upper so-cioeconomic categories as contrasted with 1424 within the lower socioeconomic category

On the basis of value priorities a working-classFrenchman 20 years old corresponds to a mid-dle-class Frenchman in his 50s More or lessthe same thing can be said in regard to theother samples from the countries of the Euro-pean Community

The age-cohort variations shown in Table 7then can scarcely be explained as a result ofthe aging process alone An explanation interms of economic and physical security duringa formative period accounts for the observedpattern of both age cohort and socioeconomicstatus differences in a parsimonious fashionFor this interpretation to be applicable how-ever we must accept the hypothesis that thesevalue priorities reflect an aspect of the individu-als orientation which tends to persist over time

Substantial age-cohort differences also persistwhen we apply finer controls for education byitself (see Table 8) Thus although formal ed-ucation seems to have a strong influence on thevalue priorities held by an individual the age-cohort differences are not simply due to thedifferent levels of education characterizinggiven age cohorts (as shown in Table 1) Mul-

Table 7 Value Preferences by Age Cohort Controlling for Socioeconomic Status

(Percentage choosing respective pure value pairs)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-5445-5455-6465+

Britain

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

262425384450

MiddleSES

(N=459)

313543434054

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

1934292533

(34)

Germany

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

254048526459

MiddleSES

(N=510)

202948415449

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

10192333

(32)(33)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1179)

10107465

MiddleSES

(N=459)

1977883

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=334)

168

104

14(14)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=1319)

15106632

MiddleSES

(N=510)

19178760

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=183)

49352014

(16)(11)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1003

Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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1004 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1011

derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 13: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1003

Table 7mdashContinued)

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

of cohortin 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465+

France

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

304145495349

MiddleSES

(N=626)

204136264056

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

172624323631

Italy

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=995)

233136384653

MiddleSES

(N=331)

1726303944

(46)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

9132524

(12)(83)

Belgium

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

243532374241

MiddleSES

(N=353)

243833233458

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

1230202026

(50)

Netherlands

Acquisitive value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

433643364640

MiddleSES

(N=526)

2329321849

(61)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

612202524

(13)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=908)

826451

MiddleSES

(N=626)

186

171094

Post-Bourgeois value

LowerSES

(N=995)

23119874

MiddleSES

(N = 331)

257

157

13(9)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=512)

31231724

85

preferences

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=240)

40372319(5)(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N=486)

144

111033

MiddleSES

(N=353)

20121619180

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=181)

3530369

18(0)

Post-Bourgeois value preferences

LowerSES

(N = 551)

01185

107

MiddleSES

(N = 526)

281516256

(0)

Upper-Mid ampUpper SES

(N=431)

5028282519

(13)

Percentages based on fewer than 30 cases are enclosed in parentheses

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1004 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1005

tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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1008 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1009

in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 14: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1004 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 8 Value Choices by Age Cohort Controlling for Education

(Percentage choosing acquisitive or post-bourgeois pairs)

Britain

Spread from

Germany

Spread

France

Spread

Italy

Spread

Belgium

Spread

Netherlands

Spread

Age in 1970

16-2425-3435-4445-5455-6465 +

youngest to oldest cohort

Acq

262728404250

+24

253649506359

+34

303946455249

+19

233337384453

+30

264129334343

+ 17

353541324242

+ 7

Primary

P-B

1296564

- 8

15126742

- 1 3

ii28451

- 1 0

239

10774

- 1 9

1939843

- 1 6

0107876

+ 6

N

(121)(216)(205)(299)(267)(315)

(235)(353)(330)(278)(278)(213)

( 84)(145)(170)(188)(184)(249)

(199)(183)(326)(264)(278)(168)

( 27)( 63)( 98)( 89)(126)(179)

(40)(100)(122)(113)( 82)( 81)

Secondary

Acq

253433304048

+23

112829313544

+33

214027324155

+34

182928431760

+42

193130282352

+ 33

161927233552

+ 36

P-B

165

12694

- 1 2

363121370

- 3 6

179

141783

- 1 4

252117141720

- 5

23142121150

- 2 3

36192124130

- 3 6

N

(73)(89)(57)(67)(45)(23)

(47)(36)(28)(29)(29)(27)

(224)(172)(139)(112)( 74)( 88)

(44)(24)(18)(14)(12)( 5)

(147)(117)(106)( 80)( 60)( 29)

(258)(173)(146)( 79)(48)( 21)

University

Acq

212138183331

+10

71817182520

+ 13

66

22153535

+29

71424152075

+67

1432178

5040

+26

01019111333

+33

P-B

1921130

2223

+ 4

614733272520

- 4 1

48483939105

- 4 3

3940241500

- 3 9

4136500

200

-41

585248562517

-41

N

(48)(19)( 8)(11)( 9)(13)

(28)(17)( 6)(11)( 8 )( 5)

(52)(50)(36)(13)(20)(20)

(87)(35)(41)(20)(15)( 8 )

(44)(25)(24)(12)(10)(10)

(19)(21)(21)( 9 )( 9 )( 6 )

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1005

tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 15: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1005

tiple classification analyses19 indicate that edu-cation is among the strongest predictors ofvalue priorities It ranks with occupation reli-gion income levels and age cohort as an im-portant influence on basic values (although allfour of the latter variables also seem to havesubstantial independent effects on value priori-ties when we control for the effects of each ofthe other variables) Our own interpretationwould emphasize that this is the case becauseeducation is our most accurate indicator of pa-rental affluence during the respondents forma-tive years It might very plausibly be arguedhowever that this relatively strong relationshipexists because of something based on educationitself for example that under present circum-stances the process of formal education assimi-lates the individual into an elite political culturewhich stresses expressive values20 Indeed wesuspect that there may be some truth in the lat-ter interpretation but we regard it as a comple-mentary rather than an alternative explanationOur data do not contain a direct measure ofeconomic security during ones formative yearsso we cannot separate the two effects But re-gardless of whether we regard the impact of ed-ucation as being largely due to education perse or a reflection of parental affluence two im-portant facts seem fairly clear (1) the age-co-hort differences are not due to educational dif-ferences alonemdasheven the less educated mem-bers of the younger cohorts show a marked ten-dency to be less acquisitive and more post-bourgeois than the older cohorts (which mayreflect the fact that in the postwar era eventhe less educated have known relative afflu-ence) (2) Even if the socioeconomic class dif-ferences are largely due to education per serather than to affluence during formative yearswe would expect them to persist over time rel-atively high levels of formal education are astable characteristic of the younger cohortswhich is not likely to disappear as the individu-als age In either case we may be justifiedtherefore in projecting changes over time asthe younger (and more educated) cohorts re-

10 This analysis is similar to a multiple regression an-alysis using dummy variables For an explanation ofthe technique see John A Sonquist MultivariateModel Building the Validation of a Search Strategy(Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research 1970)

20 Granting that this is the process at work we mustask why this elite political culture gives relativelyhigh priority to expressive values one is tempted todraw on relative economic security to supply at leastpart of the answer As is pointed out later in thissection however higher education does not seem tobe inherently linked with a libertarian political po-sition at other points in history it has been associatedwith relatively authoritarian and conservative positions

Table 9 Percentage Choosing Freedom of Speechby Age Group Germany 1962

Age in 1962

16-2525-3030-5050-6565+

58not included in 1949 sample52 504034

Source EMNID Pressedienst (Gallup-InstitutBielefeld) cited in Encounter Vol 22 No 4 (April1964) p 53 Age groupings are those given in thissource

place the older groups in the adult electorateUltimately of course our thesis can be

proved or disproved only with the aid of longi-tudinal datamdashand as we noted earlier very lit-tle is available at present A small body of rele-vant time-series data is available however andit seems worth examining The EMNID insti-tute of West Germany employed an item con-cerning value priorities in a series of surveys ofGerman public opinion from 1949 through1963 the question was Which of the FourFreedoms do you personally consider most im-portant Like the items used to measure valuepriorities in our own survey this was a forced-choice question requiring the individual tomake a selection among positively valueditems according to his personal priorities Andbecause the two leading choices by far wereFreedom from Want and Freedom ofSpeech the choice an individual made proba-bly tends to tap the dimension central to thisinquirymdashacquisitive versus post-bourgeois val-ues In 1962 for example nearly half of theGerman sample ranked Freedom of Speechas the most important freedom Let us look inTable 9 at the relationship between age andpreference for that value in 1962 (unfortu-nately the only year for which an age break-down is available)

The pattern of age differences shown in Ta-ble 9 is similar to what we found in our owndata the young are much more likely to placea high priority on free speech than are the oldPrima facie this age-relationship could be in-terpreted as reflecting either a life-cycle effector intergenerational change21

Other possibilities also exist(1) It could be due to sampling error We believe

the latter possibility can be excluded however wehave found a similar age-group pattern in all seven ofthe European surveys cited thus far moreover wehave examined responses to items from a large numberof American surveys which implicitly or openly askthe individual to choose between political liberties and

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1006 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 16: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1006 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

The former interpretation has a certain ap-peal it is linked with the seemingly parsimoni-ous assumption that nothing is really changingmdashyoung people will be like their parents whenthey get older When examined a little moreclosely it becomes apparent that the life-cycleinterpretation is in no sense more parsimoniousthan the generational interpretation indeed itcould be considered less so though it assumesthat the preferences of a nation as a whole willshow no change this result can be obtainedonly if each of the age-groups within the nationdoes change Furthermore it assumesmdashoftenwithout even considering the alternativemdashthatthe direction of any shift in preferences can betaken for granted they must move in the direc-tion which tends to erase the age-group differ-ences We agree it would be unrealistic to as-sume that individuals value priorities will showno change over their adult livesmdashbut it is con-ceivable that as they age they might move inthe direction of giving a higher priority to liber-tarian values (for example) rather than alower priority Fortunately we are able to ex-amine trends in the percentages giving top pri-ority to the item cited in Table 9 The EMNIDinstitutes responses to the Four Freedomsitem over the period 1949-1963 are reportedin Table 10 The changes over time are impres-sive in size These shifts might be attributed totwo types of causes 1) The mechanics of in-tergenerational change This process has twoaspects (a) the recruitment of new (younger)members into the sampling universe from 1949to 1963 and (b) mortality among members ofthe 1949 samplemdashmost of the group aged 65+in that year would have died off (its youngestmembers would be 79 in 1963) 2) Adult atti-tude change The life-cycle effect constitutes a

threats to order or national security A similar age-group pattern occurs in virtually all of them See forexample Hazel Gaudet The Polls Freedom ofSpeech Public Opinion Quarterly 34 (Fall 1970)The same pattern occurs in responses to comparableitems in the SRC 1968 presidential election surveyThe likelihood of finding such a pattern in so manysurveys from post-industrial societies as a result of sam-pling error appears negligible

(2) The age-group pattern might be due to differ-ential birth rates or life-expectancies among socialgroups having distinctive value priorities These wouldtend to give the group having the higher birth rate (orshorter life expectancy) a disproportionately strongrepresentation among the younger cohorts Empiric-ally lower income groups tend to have had higherbirth rates and shorter life expectancies than upperincome groups over recent decades (For example seeButler and Stokes op cit pp 265-270) But lowerincome groups are relatively likely to express ac-quisitive value priorities Despite this fact post-bourgeois values are relatively widespread among theyounger cohorts

Table 10 Changing Value PrioritiesGermany 1949-1963

Which of the Four Freedoms do youpersonally consider most important

(Percentage choosing given item)

Freedom from WantFreedom of SpeechFreedom from FearFreedom of WorshipNA DK

1949

3526171210

1954

35321716

1958

284410162

1962

17478

1315

1963

155610145

Source EMNID Pressedienst cited in Table 9

special case of adult attitude change which as-sumes (in this case) that individuals will be-come less libertarian and more economically-motivated as they grow older

The data from Tables 9 and 10 enable us toestimate parameters for the two processesWhile rough calculations indicate that onlyabout one-third of the observed shift in valuepriorities from 1949 to 1962 might be attrib-uted to the recruitment mortality process thedirection of the remaining adult attitude changeruns directly counter to that predicted by thelife-cycle interpretation It seems clear that in-sofar as a shift in priorities occurred among in-dividuals who were in the sampling universe inboth 1949 and 1962 they tended to move inthe post-bourgeois direction as they agedmdashnot the reverse

The time-series data reported in Table 10moreover has an excellent fit with recent Ger-man economic history In the Germany of1949 Freedom from Want was by far theleading choice Germanys recovery from thedevastation of World War II had just begun toget under way and economic needs were ex-tremely pressing for most of the populationEven under conditions of poverty howeverfreedom of speech was the second-rankingchoice The fourteen years that followed werethe years of the Wirtschaftswunder Germanyrose from poverty to plenty with almost incred-ible speed and the two leading choices ex-changed places the percentage choosing Free-dom of Speech more than doubled while thepercentage choosing Freedom from Want fellto less than half its former level (choice of theother two alternatives remaining relatively con-stant) These data suggest that a society mayindeed show a shift in value priorities in re-sponse to changing conditions of scarcity Ad-mittedly this must be regarded as an excep-tional case only rarely does so great a changein the average individuals economic situation

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Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 17: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1007

Table 11 The University Crisis Value Climates in Student Milieu v Administrative Milieu

(Percentage choosing the respective pure value pairs within the 16-24 year-oldcohort [students] and the 45-54 year-old cohort [administrators] of the

upper-middleupper SES category)

Students MilieuAdministrators Milieu

Britain

Acq P-B

19 1625 4

Germany

Acq

1033

P-B

4914

France

Acq

1732

P-B

3124

Italy

Acq P-B

9 4024 19

Belgium

Acq

1220

P-B

359

Netherlands

Acq

625

P-B

5025

occur within so short a space of time But thedirection of movement clearly conforms to theexpectations generated by our hypotheses

Some fragmentary but interesting time-seriesevidence from the other side of the Atlanticmight be drawn from two excellent studies ofthe political consciousness of Yale studentsEach seems to be the result of penetrating ob-servation Robert Lanes Political Thinking andConsciousness22 and Kenneth KenistonsYoung Radicals23 The former study is basedon material gathered in the 1950s and early1960s the latter study is based on observationsmade about ten years later Being drawn fromthe same milieu with a decades time-lag theyprovide an impressionistic sort of time-seriesdata And the picture which emerges is one ofprofound change Again and again in Lanesmaterial one is made aware of the pressures to-ward conformity with a conservative norm tobe socially acceptable in the Yale of the late50s one felt obliged to identify with the Re-publican Party and to support the policies ofthe Establishment The situation a decade latershows a fascinating contrast As Kenistonmakes clear the Young Radicals who hadthen become a salient part of the Yale scenewere not acting out of youthful rebellion theywere advocating policies which seemed to thema more faithful implementation of the valuesthat had been inculcated in their homes Yettheir views sharply conflicted with the socialand foreign policies of the popularly electedgovernments whether Democratic or Republi-can In another book which was shaped by ob-servation of Yale students Charles Reich givesan insightful interpretation of this complex pro-cess of change24 His analysis in part is similarto our own a younger generation has emergedwhich has a basically different perspective fromearlier generations (Reich refers to the youngergenerations value system as Consciousness

(Chicago Markham Publishing Company 1969)23 (New York Harcourt Brace and World 1968)The Greening of America (New York Random

House 1970)

III) My conclusions diverge from those ofReich chiefly in the extent to which I wouldgeneralize these changes The present data sug-gest that although post-industrial societies mayindeed be undergoing a transformation similarto the emergence of Consciousness III theprocess of transformation is decidedly unevenand the earlier types of consciousness continueto be predominant even among youthmdashexceptin certain sectors above all the universities

A life-cycle interpretation tends to write offsuch evidence of intergenerational differencesas due to youthful rebelliousness or high spiritsoften without considering the type of valuesmotivating radical youth Although I am notaware of a body of micro-analytic data fromEurope comparable to the Yale studies justcited observation of political activity on agross level suggests a significant change in thevalues espoused by European student activistsduring the past generation or so One needscarcely dwell on the Rightist and authoritarianaspects of student movements in Germany andItaly of the 1930s What is perhaps less widelyrecognized is that the predominant thrust ofpolitical activism among French students in the1930s also had a markedly conservative char-acter their most critical intervention in Frenchpolitics undoubtedly took place in early 1934when Monarchist and quasi-Fascist youth(mostly upper middle-class and many of themfrom the universities) played a prominent rolein a series of riots which very nearly overthrewthe Third Republic25 Then as now British stu-dents seem to have been a deviant case rela-tively liberal in the 1930s and relatively con-servative in 1970

The wave of intense student political activitywhich swept both Europe and North Americain the late 1960s seems to have diminished to-day20 Was it a campus fad or does it represent

23 See for example William L Shirer The Collapseof the Third Republic (New York Simon amp Schuster1969) pp 201-223

Among the reasons for this decline in activitythe fact that some concessions were made to some of

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1008 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1009

in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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1010 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 18: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1008 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

a manifestation of broader changes in post-in-dustrial society I believe that the present dataand analytic framework provide a useful per-spective from which to interpret its implica-tions

To illustrate let us look at Table 11 (whichis simply a subset of Table 7) University stu-dents in these countries tend to be drawn over-whelmingly from the upper and upper-middlesocioeconomic strata If we take the youngestcohort of these strata as roughly indicative ofthe value climate in the student milieu in eachcountrymdashand if we regard the 45-54 year-oldcohort of the same socioeconomic category asindicative of the milieu from which the univer-sity administrators are drawnmdashwe can form anidea of the contrasting value climates withinthe two milieux27 Our data suggest that therehave always been a certain number of peoplewith the value priorities which we call post-bourgeois but that until recently they were arelatively small minority Within the last de-cade they seem to have become relatively nu-merousmdashconstituting a major political bloc inthemselves furthermore they tend to bebrought together as a group capable of settingthe prevailing tone in an important institutionalcontextmdashthe universities As Table 11 indi-cates post-bourgeois types now seem to hold aheavy plurality over the traditionally predomi-

the student demands is probably the most obviousfactor but I suspect that its importance is overratedAnother reason is that major political confrontationsalong the acquisitivepost-bourgeois dimension arelikely to be counterproductive for the latter group un-der current conditions the acquisitives still seem tohold a heavy numerical predominancemdashas became in-creasingly apparent on both sides of the Atlantic by theend of the 1960s Still another factor seems pertinentin America the economic recession of 1970 may havedrawn greater attention to economic considerations onthe part of groups which had previously given themlittle notice The conventional wisdom holds that eco-nomic troubles tend to help the traditional Leftparadoxically (but in keeping with our analysis ofintergenerational change) we would expect them totend to undermine the New Left

27 Except among the youngest cohort we do not havea large enough number of university-educated re-spondents to permit reliable estimates of the responsesof those who actually have university educationsWithin the youngest cohort we do have at least 30student respondents from four of our six countriesthey tend to be somewhat more post-bourgeois thanother members of their age group and socioeconomicstratum but only moderately so they are on theaverage four percentage points less acquisitive andseven points more post-bourgeois than their peers inTable 11 This suggests that it is not principally theuniversity milieu which accounts for their value pri-orities (although this seems to play a part) but thefact that the students are from the youngest and mostaffluent social categories

nant acquisitive types in the student milieu offive of our six national samples While theymay not yet constitute an absolute majorityeven in this setting their preponderance overthe acquisitive types may enable the post-bour-geois group to act as the leading influence onmany of their ambivalent peers By contrastwith the student milieu the value climate fromwhich the administrators are drawn tends tocontain a plurality of acquisitive over post-bourgeois types The administrators moreoverare subject to relatively strong pressures fromsociety as a wholemdashwhich tends to be far moreconservative in its value priorities than are theadministrators themselves The result (ratherfrequently) is not simply disagreement butconflicts which seem unamenable to compro-misemdashbecause they are based on fundamen-tally different value priorities (An incidentaloutcome seems to be the frequent rotation ofuniversity administrators)

A notable exception to the foregoing patternappears in the British sample where there stillseems to be a narrow plurality choosing acquis-itive value priorities even within the studentmilieumdasha finding which may go far to explainthe relative tranquility of the university scenein that country While there have been a fewrelatively subdued uprisings at British universi-ties in recent years one can point to studentexplosions which dwarf them in every one ofthe five other countries

According to our data West Germany seemsto be the country which has the greatest degreeof intergenerational strain in her universitieswith a 31 predominance of acquisitive valuesin the administrative milieu and a 51 pre-dominance of post-bourgeois value choices inthe student milieu This may seem momenta-rily surprising since France is clearly the coun-try in which the most resounding student upris-ing to date has taken place To be sure ourdata indicate considerable intergenerationalstrain in France as well but it seems to be lessextreme than in the German case These factsserve to remind us that survey data cannot beinterpreted without reference to the institu-tional and geographical context from whichthey are drawn We would attribute the differ-ing outcomes to structural factors importantmanifestations of student discontent took placeat a number of locations in Germany well be-fore they occurred in France But the high de-gree of educational and administrative central-ization in France meant that when an explosiondid take place in Paris it was a crisis that en-gulfed the whole country

The hypothesis of intergenerational change

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1009

in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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1010 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 19: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1009

in value priorities (based on different levels ofeconomic scarcity during a cohorts formativeyears) seems to have a good fit with a wide va-riety of evidence with the attitudinal patternsof the respective age cohorts and with those ofgiven socioeconomic strata in samples from sixnations with the economic history of given na-tions and with cross-national differences in eco-nomic experience and with what time-seriesdata are available It would be foolish to denythat individuals can and do change during theiradult years But if ones malleability is rela-tively great during preadult years and tends todecline thereafter we would expect to find resi-dues from formative experiences in the re-sponse patterns of the various adult cohorts28

Weighing the evidence as a whole it seems tome that our data do give a rather strong sugges-tion of intergenerational change

Value Priorities and Political PartisanshipThe patterns of value preferences outlined

above may represent a potential force for long-term political change They might encouragethe development of new political parties rela-tively responsive to emerging value cleavagesOr they might lead to a realignment of the so-cial bases of existing political parties makingage an increasingly important basis of cleavage(during a transitional period) and eventuallyperhaps tending to reverse the traditionalalignment of the working class with the Leftand the middle class with the Right For interms of the value priorities discussed in thisarticle upper status respondents are far likelierthan lower status respondents to support a setof post-bourgeois principles which seem more

28 In their analysis of British panel survey datagathered in 1963 1964 and 1965 Butler and Stokesop cit pp 58-59 comment

A theory of political senescence as it is some-times called fits comfortably the more general be-lief that the attitudes of youth are naturally liberalor radical while those of age are conservative In the 1960s Conservative strength tended to beweakest among those born in the 1920s and justbefore Electors younger than this tended actuallyto be a little more Conservative than those who laywithin the precincts of early middle age This ir-regularity although an embarrassment to any simpletheory of conservatism increasing with age canreadily be reconciled with the concept that the con-servation of established political tendencies is whatincreases with age we must ask not how oldthe elector is but when it was that he was young

For an excellent example of age-cohort analysis basedon data at the elite level see Robert D PutnamStudying Elite Political Culture the Case of Ideol-ogy American Political Science Review 65 (Sep-tember 1971) Putnam finds evidence of significantintergenerational changes in basic political style amongBritish and Italian politicians

compatible with parties of movement than withparties of order Do we find any relationshipbetween political party choice and our indica-tors of underlying value preferences The re-spondents in each of our samples were askedIf there were a General Election tomorrow forwhich party would you be most likely to vote

Responses to this question are cross-tabulatedwith the two pure value pairs in Table 12the parties are ordered according to the con-ventional notion of a Left-Right continuum

In the British sample the differences we findare of moderate size but they are in the ex-pected direction respondents choosing post-bourgeois values are more likely to support theLabour Party than are acquisitive-type respon-dents the intergroup differences amounts toeight percentage points The post-bourgeoisgroup is also relatively likely to support theLiberal Party and the relative gains for bothother parties come at the expense of the Con-servativesmdashwho are supported by a solid ma-jority of the acquisitives but by a minority ofthe post-bourgeois group A somewhat similarpattern appears in the Belgian data

In all four of the other countries we findquite sizeable differences in the partisan prefer-ences of the two groups and the differences areconsistently in the expected direction withinthe Dutch sample for example post-bourgeoisrespondents are more likely to support the par-ties of the Left by a margin of 23 percentagepoints they give heavier support to the partiestraditionally considered to be of the Left by aspread of 26 points in Italy and by a spread of15 points in Germany (22 points if we view to-days FDP as a party of the Left which insome respects seems to be the case)

In France the differences are the most im-pressive of all post-bourgeois respondents aremore likely to support parties usually consid-ered Leftist by a margin of 36 percentagepoints over the acquisitives A solid majority(56 per cent) of the latter group supports theGaullist UDR and their allies the RI whileby contrast a bare 16 per cent of the post-bourgeois group supports the Gaullist coalitionAlthough it enjoys a wide plurality in the na-tion as a whole the Gaullist coalition draws analmost insignificant minority of support fromthe group holding post-bourgeois value priori-ties This finding tends to confirm our interpre-tation of the May Revolt mentioned earliermdashthat Frances crisis of 1968 brought about apartial repolarization of the electorate accord-ing to underlying value preferences (with manyworking-class respondents shifting to the Gaul-

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1010 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 20: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1010 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 12 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Labour

3745

+ 8

Left

3470

+36

Socialist

3138

+ 7

Britain

Liberal Conserv

7 579 46

+ 2 -11

France

UDRCenter RI

10 5615 16

+ 5 -40

Belgium

Liberal Christian(PLP) Social

13 5626 37

+13 -19

N

(570)(126)

N

(533)(170)

N

(253)(117)

SPD

4863

+15

Left

2854

+26

SocialistDem 66

4669

+23

FDP

512

+ 7

DCPRI

5638

- 1 8

Germany

CDUCSU

4623

- 23

Italy

Liberal

88

NPD

24

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

Netherlands

Liberal

1214

+ 2

Confes-sional

4317

- 26

N

(648)(164)

N

(398)(168)

N

(315)(216)

list side while post-bourgeois elements fromthe middle class shifted to the Left) This sud-den shift in vote from 1967 to 1968 does notseem to have been simply a temporary reactionto the 1968 crisis with the voters returning totheir normal partisan allegiance after the emer-gency had faded away On the contrary theFrench electorate still seems to retain an un-equalled degree of political polarization accord-ing to value preferences in 1970 nearly twoyears after the May Revolt This interpretationtends to be supported by data from a panel sur-vey reported elsewhere29 The apparently en-during nature of this redistribution of politicalpositions once it has taken place suggests thatit may indeed correspond to relatively deep-seated values In this connection it seems sig-nificant that the other two countries in our sur-vey which have experienced the most massiveNew Left upheavals (Germany and Italy) alsoshow relatively high degrees of polarization ac-

a Philip Converse and Roy Pierce noted a sizeableshift to the Right from 1967 to 1968 within a panelof respondents asked to rank themselves on a Left-Right continuum in both years After re-interviewingthese respondent a third time they report that morethan 99 per cent of the change from 1967 to 1968 waspreserved in 1969 See Converse and Pierce BasicCleavages in French Politics and the Disorders ofMay and June 1968 paper presented at the 7thWorld Congress of Sociology Varna Bulgaria Sep-tember 1970

cording to value priorities although its magni-tude remains smaller than what we find inFrance By contrast Great Britain (apart fromethnic conflicts in Northern Ireland) has prob-ably had the greatest measure of domestic tran-quility among these countries in recent yearsmdashand shows a relatively weak relationship be-tween value priorities and political partychoice

Admittedly we have not mapped out inany precise fashion the differences betweenthe political goals of the acquisitive andpost-bourgeois groups the latter group maystill be in the process of defining a programMoreover there is at least an equal lack ofprecision in the party labels which we havejust employed we regard Left andRight as merely convenient shorthandterms under which to group (for cross-na-tional comparisons) two sets of partieswhich tend to differ in being relatively con-servative or relatively change-oriented butwhich otherwise vary a good deal fromcountry to country To be sure the acquisi-tive and post-bourgeois types of respondentsdo seem to react quite differently to thesetwo sets of parties and the pattern is fairlyconsistent cross-nationally But the cleavageis not one which runs neatly along the tradi-tional Left-Right dimension Perhaps for thisreason political polarization according to un-

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derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 21: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1011

derlying value preferences seems much morepronounced in relation to what might becalled New Left parties (in countries wherethey exist) than in relation to what might becalled the Traditional Left To illustrate letus take a closer look at the vote for certainsmall parties which seem to have a distinc-tive appeal for the post-bourgeois constitu-ency (see Table 13)

In the French case the PSU emergedfrom the crisis of May and June 1968 as thepolitical embodiment of the New Left theonly significant party which had unambigu-ously endorsed the May Revolt Although itpolled only 4 per cent of the vote nationallyand is supported by only 2 per cent of theacquisitives in our sample it draws far morethan this share of support among the post-bourgeois constituencymdashgetting fully 29 percent of this groups preferences Bycomparison the other parties of the FrenchLeft enjoy only a relatively small advantageamong the post-bourgeois groupmdashgetting 9percentage points more support there thanamong the acquisitive constituency A simi-lar pattern applies to support for two otherparties which might be said to have a moreor less New Left coloring Demokraten 66 inThe Netherlands and the PSIUP in ItalyThe post-bourgeois group shows a markedpreference for these parties over the otherparties conventionally regarded as of theLeft80

M In the Italian case however the Communist partyalso seems to enjoy a relative preference within thepost-bourgeois constituency the PCI and PSIUPcombined are supported by seven per cent of theacquisitives and by 30 per cent of the post-bourgeoisgroup (leaving the two Socialist parties only a slightlygreater proportion of support from the post-bourgeoisgroup than from the acquisitives) It appears then

When we turn to the Belgian case we find arather surprising phenomenon In traditionalterms we probably would not view the Belgianseparatist parties as characteristically of theLeft at all But in their basis of recruitmentthese parties (both Flemish and Walloon butpredominately the former) play a role compa-rable to that played by the PSU in Francethey draw their strength very disproportion-ately from the post-bourgeois types rather thanfrom the acquisitives In France the ratio isnearly 151 in Belgium there is nearly a 41over-representation of post-bourgeois as com-pared with acquisitive types Indeed when weinclude the separatist parties in our analysisthe Belgian Socialists actually show a slight def-icit among the post-bourgeois group whencompared with the acquisitives (in Table 13)

The New Left parties and the Belgian sep-aratists might seem to have little in commonother than a radical opposition to fundamentalaspects of the established social system But thisdisparity of political goals juxtaposed with anapparent similarity in social bases and underly-ing value preferences leads us back to a sug-gestion about the nature of post-bourgeois poli-tics which was mentioned earlier an importantlatent function may be to satisfy the need forbelongingness According to Maslow this needcomes next on the individual-level hierarchyafter needs related to sustenance and safetyhave been fulfilled I would acknowledge andemphasize the importance of the manifest goalsof a given movement in a given context but it

that members of our Italian sample react to the PCIalmost as if it were a New Left partymdashan interestingfinding in view of the fact that support for the FrenchCommunist party does not show a similar patternone wonders if the PCF cut itself off from post-bourgeois support in repudiating the May Revolt

Table 13 Political Party Choice by Value Preferences Effect of the New-Left and Belgian Separatist Parties

(Percentage choosing given political party)

Value -Pref

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

Value Pre

AcquisitivePost-BourgDifference

PSU

229

+27

f

OtherLeft

3241

+ 9

Dem 66

1338

+25

France

Center

1015

+ 5

UDRRI

5616

-40

Netherlands

Socialist

3231

- 1

Lib

1114

+ 3

N

(533)(170)

Confes-sional

4317

- 2 6

PSIUP

17

+6

N

(315)(216)

OtherLeft

2647

+21

Separatist

1036

+26

Italy

DC PRI Liberal

5638

-18

Socialist

2824

- 4

88

Belgium

Liberal

1216

+ 4

ExtremeRight

91

- 8

ChristianSocial

5023

- 2 7

N

(39S)(168)

N

(271)(128)

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1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 22: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1012 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

also seems likely that protest movements whichare in radical conflict with their environmentprovide their members with a sense of belong-ingness In the midst of large anonymous bu-reaucratically-organized societies these move-ments may become tight little communitieswhich are bound together all the more closelybecause they have a sense of radical oppositionto and isolation from the surrounding societyInsofar as the drive for belongingness is an im-portant component of these movements theirideological content can be quite flexible If weview the underlying dimension as based in parton this motivation there is common ground be-tween the Belgian Separatists and the New Leftgroups

The similarity goes beyond this The Flemishseparatists clearly are not seeking economicgains Indeed they seem prepared to sacrificethem for what they regard as cultural and hu-manitarian gains In this respect also theymight be grouped with the New Left After theneed for belongingness the next priorities (ac-cording to Maslow) are for self-esteem andself-actualization and for fulfillment of onesintellectual and esthetic potential In a some-what chaotic way most of these (postacquisi-tive) values seem to be reflected in the issuesespoused by the New Left the movement re-flects a broad shift in emphasis from economicissues to life-style issues31

This ordering of priorities is of course not newin itself Weber and Veblen among others calledattention to the disdain for economic striving and anemphasis on distinctive life styles among economicallysecure strata throughout history Veblen interprets theanti-acquisitive life style of past leisure classes as anattempt to protect their superior status by excludingindividuals rising from lower economic levels SeeThorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York Modern Library 1934) It is highlydubious whether this interpretation applies to thecontemporary post-bourgeois group as a whole Itsmembers appear universalistic in outlook and some-times seem to imitate the life-style of lower strataConspicuous consumption seems to play a relativelysmall role in their behaviormdashunless we interpret goingbarefoot as a devious variation on conspicuous con-sumption We would view needs for intellectual andesthetic self-realization as political motivations in them-selves Concern for pollution of the environment andthe despoiling of its natural beautymdashissues whichplayed a minor political role until quite recentlymdashhave suddenly become prominent with the emergenceinto political relevance of the current youth cohortsThese concerns may be justified in terms of self-preservation (We are about to suffocate beneath anavalanche of garbage) but this argument may besomewhat hyperbolic I suspect that behind this newwave of protest there may be a heightened sensitivityto the esthetic defects of industrial society It seemsclear that other factors are also involved in the emerg-ence of a New Left situational factors unique to agiven movement in a given society I will not attemptto deal with them in this cross-national analysis

We find a quite interesting relationship be-tween value priorities and political party choicein our data I have spoken of this phenomenonas reflecting a tendency toward reordering po-litical party choices to bring them into har-mony with underlying values But this line ofreasoning assumes a causal relationship inwhich the value preference is an independentvariable capable of influencing current partychoice To what extent is this assumption justi-fied It could be argued that the association be-tween value priorities and party choice is spuri-ousmdashthat it results from the fact that given in-dividuals have been raised in relatively conser-vative (or relatively Left-oriented) back-grounds shaping them in a way which accountsfor the presence of both the value preferencesand the political party choice currently ex-pressed

It is difficult to provide a conclusive demon-stration of what caused what but we can sub-ject the foregoing interpretation to an interest-ing test Our respondents were asked a series ofquestions to ascertain what had been their par-ents political party preference or (failing this)their general Left-Right tendance Let us exam-ine the relationship between value prioritiesand current party choice controlling for thepolitical background in which the respondentwas raised (see Table 14) A comparison ofthe Ns given for each group in Table 14 indi-cates that there is indeed some tendency forthe children of Left-affiliated parents to show arelative preference for post-bourgeois valuesthe strength of this tendency varies considera-bly from country to country But for presentpurposes the crucial finding which emergesfrom Table 14 is that even when we controlfor this source of variation quite substantialdifferences persist between the political partypreferences of acquisitive-oriented respondentsand those of post-bourgeois respondents Inmany cases these differences become evenlarger than they were in Table 12 Table 14shows the flow of voters from the party inwhich they were raised to other partiesmdashandthe flow certainly does seem to be influenced bythe value priorities of the individual In theBritish sample evidence of intergenerationaldefection from the two major parties is rela-tively weak and we find two mildly anomalouscases (in which post-bourgeois respondents area trifle less likely to support the Labour Partythan are the acquisitive respondents) Even inthe British sample however the net tendency isfor Labour to be relatively strong and the Con-servatives relatively weak among the post-bour-geois group holding parental background con-stant In our Dutch sample among those raised

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 23: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1013

by parents who supported one of the confes-sional parties 78 per cent of the group showingacquisitive values remain faithful to those par-ties by contrast among those indicating post-bourgeois values only 44 per cent have stayedwith the church-linked partiesmdashwhile an equalnumber have shifted their support to the partiesof the Left (the Socialists or Demokraten 66)Among Dutch respondents who were raised bysupporters of the Socialist party there seems tobe greater continuity fully 92 per cent of thepost-bourgeois group say that they too wouldvote for the Left among the acquisitive-ori-ented group however we find a rate of defec-tion which is twice this high

Quite sizeable differences appear in the Ital-ian sample most notably among those raisedin a Christian Democratic or Centrist back-ground only 4 per cent of the acquisitive-type respondents defect to the Leftmdashas com-pared with 33 per cent among the post-bour-geois respondents In the German samplesomewhat similarly post-bourgeois respondentsfrom Christian Democratic backgrounds showa relatively strong tendency to defect from thispolitical affiliation while 63 per cent of theacquisitive respondents remain in the Chris-tian Democratic fold only 46 per cent of thepost-bourgeois respondents do so The partisanshift seems to reflect a relative drawing awayfrom the church-linked parties on the part ofthe post-bourgeois group32 it continues thetrend toward secularism traditionally associatedwith the Left Indeed the post-bourgeois groupseems noticeably more sensitive to the suppos-edly outworn religioussecular cleavage than tothe socioeconomic one consistently across oursamples the Christian Democratic parties showa heavy relative loss among this constituencywhile the Liberal partiesmdashwhich emphasizefreedom of expression but often are more con-servative on socioeconomic issues than theChristian Democratsmdashshow a relative gainThe shift indeed seems more responsive tolife-style values than to economic ones

The most dramatic evidence of intergenera-tional change in political party loyalties isfound in the French sample Among the groupraised within families which supported political

The linkage between church and party is most ex-plicit on the Continent but the British ConservativeParty is no exception to this pattern affiliation withthe Established Church of England is strongly linkedwith preference for the Conservative Party Even whenwo control for social class the Anglicans in oursample are more likely to favor the ConservativeParty than are members of minority faiths or non-religious respondents by a margin of nearly 20 per-centage points The more frequently one attends theAnglican Church moveover the more likely one isto support the Conservatives

parties of the Right those with acquisitivevalue priorities are very likely to continue inthat tradition 91 per cent support the Gaullistcoalition There seems to be an astoundinglyhigh rate of defection among the post-bour-geois group however 70 per cent of them indi-cate that they would vote for one of the partiesof the Left Conversely among those raised ina family which preferred the Left there is littledefection to the Gaullist coalition Among theacquisitive value group the rate of defection tothe Gaullists is nearly five times as high asubstantial 29 per cent say that they would votefor one of the governing parties

A number of the cells in Table 14 containtoo few cases to be significant by themselves33

but the overall pattern is clear the presence ofpost-bourgeois values is linked consistently witha relative tendency to remain loyal to the Leftamong those who were brought up in that tra-dition and with a tendency to shift to the Leftamong those who were raised in other politicalclimates Jennings and Niemi have found evi-dence that recall data (such as ours) tends toexaggerate the degree of consistency betweenpolitical party preferences of parent and child(perhaps as a result of the respondents ten-dency to reduce cognitive dissonance)34 Thisfinding implies that if anything our data prob-ably understate the degree to which intergener-ational party shift is taking place

Implications of Intergenerational ChangeOur conclusion then is that the transforma-

tion of value priorities which our data seem toindicate does imply a change in the social basisof political partisanship in most if not all ofthese countries This change may already havebeen under way for some time To illustrate Inthe first elections of the Fifth Republic theFrench electorate apparently voted along classlines to a very considerable extent Lipset forexample provides a table showing that work-ing-class voters were 29 per cent more likely tosupport the parties of the Left than were mem-bers of the modern middle class in 19583S Our

The reduced number of cases is due to the factthat here we are dealing only with those respondents

1 Who have a political party preferencemdashwhichthey are willing to disclose and

2 Whose parents had a political party preferencemdashwhich was known by the respondent

M See M Kent Jennings and Richard G Niemi TheTransmission of Political Values from Parent toChild The American Political Science Review 62(March 1968) pp 169-184

Calculated from Seymour M Lipset op citChapter V Table IV Our comparison focuses on thetwo more dynamic groups of industrial societymdashtheworkers on one hand and the modern middle classon the other hand Although the principle is similarour measure of class voting therefore is not identical

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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1014 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

Table 14 Intergenerational Party Shifts Political Party Choice byValue Preferences Controlling for Parents Political Party

(Percentage choosing given party)

Value Pref bull

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Parents preferred Labour

Respondent would voteLab Lib Cons N

64 5 31 (185)72 7 21 (47)

+ 8 +2 -10

Britain

Parents preferred Liberals

Lab Lib

23 1722 34

- 1 +17

Germany

Cons N

61 (64)44 ( 9)

- 1 7

Parents preferred Conservatives

Lab

1210

- 2

Lib

313

+10

Cons

8577

- 8

N

(171)(31)

Value PrefParents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Liberals FDP Parents preferred Christian Democrats

Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Soc

8787

FDP

48

+4

ChrDems

96

- 3

N

(78)(36)

Soc

1340

FDP

6360

France

ChrDems

130

N

(8)(5)

Soc

3545

+10

FDP

27

+5

ChrDems

6346

-17

N

015)( 41)

Parents preferred Left Comm Soc Parents preferred Center MRP Parents preferred Right Indep Gaullist

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

PSU

625

+19

OtherLeft

6052

- 8

Center

58

+3

UDRRI

296

- 2 3

N

(106)( 52)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

826

+18

Center

6939

- 3 0

Italy

UDRRI

230

- 2 3

N

(13)(23)

PSU

035

+35

OtherLeft

435

+31

Center

50

- 5

UDRRI

9129

- 6 2

N

(118)( 34)

Parents preferred Left Com Soc Parents preferred Center Chr Dems Parents preferred Liberals Extr Right

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Left

8192

+11

DCPRI

135

- 8

Lib

43

- 1

ExtrRight

20

- 2

N

(53)(38)

Left

433

+29

DCPRI

9264

- 2 8

Lib

24

+2

Belgium

ExtrRight

30

- 3

N

(119)(55)

Left

3375

+42

DCPRI

70

- 7

Lib

6025

- 3 5

ExtrRight

00

N

(15)( 8)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred Catholic tendance Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would vote

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

Sep

11

+11

Soc

8378

- 5

Liberal(PLP)

1011

+ 1

ChrSoc

i 1

N

(40)(18)

Sep

938

+29

Soc

103

- 7

Netherlands

Lib-eral

511

+ 6

ChrSoc

7649

- 2 7

N

(101)( 37)

Sep

40

+40

Soc

IS

- 1 8

Lib-eral

5960

+ 1

ChrSoc

24

- 2 4

N

(17)(10)

Parents preferred Socialists Parents preferred confessional party(KVP ARP CHU)

Parents preferred Liberals

Value Pref Respondent would voteKVP

Soc Liberal ARPD66 CHU N

SocD66

LiberalKVPARPCHU

SocD66

KVPLiberal ARP

CHU

AcquisitivePost-Bourg

Difference

8692

+ 6 +4

110

-11

(57)(73)

1644

+28

611

+ 5

7944

-35

(102)( 72)

2341

+ 18

7359

-14 - 5

(22)(18)

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1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1015

1968 survey indicated that the percentagespread between social classes was only abouthalf this size in 1967 and that it dropped sev-eral points from 1967 to 1968 Our 1970 dataindicate little tendency for the French elector-ate to return to the 1967 level of class voting

Paul Abramson moreover has recently re-ported evidence of a decline in the social classbasis of political partisanship in France Ger-many and Italymdashalthough not in Great Brit-ain36 Our own data suggest a pressure thatshould tend to reduce the incidence of classvoting in Britain but this pressure seems to bea good deal weaker there than in the Continen-tal countries We would expect the extent towhich partisan repolarization actually takesplace to be limited by the relative strength ofexisting political party identification in givencountries the comparatively high degree of re-polarization apparent in France may have beenfacilitated by the relatively weak sense of politi-cal party identification which characterized theelectorate of that country until very recentlyConversely the relatively small amount of re-polarization indicated in our British samplemay reflect the presence of comparativelystrong political party loyalties in Britain A re-cent analysis of socialization data by Jack Den-nis and Donald McCrone for example sug-gests that feelings of identification with a politi-cal party were less widespread and less intense inFrance than in any of five other Western de-mocracies studied (although Dennis and Mc-Crone find evidence of an increase over time inpolitical party identifiers in France a findingwhich our own data support) According toDennis and McCrooe the publics of GreatBritain and the US apparently rank highest inextent and intensity of political party identifica-

with that used by Robert R Alford in Party and So-ciety (Chicago Rand McNally 1962) The traditionalmiddle class as a stagnant or declining element inthe economy has not shown a change comparable tothat which apparently has taken place among themodern middle class combining these two groups (asAlford does) dampens the effect we are describing

See Paul R Abramson The Changing Role ofSocial Class in Western European Politics Compara-tive Political Studies (July 1971) Seymour M Lipsetand Stein Rokkan argue that the party systems ofthe 1960s reflect with but few significant exceptionsthe cleavage structures of the 1920s see Lipset andRokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments Cross-National Perspectives (New York The Free Press1967) p 50 On the other hand Lipset reports somedata which seem to indicate a decline in class votingamong the American electorate from 1936 to 1968see Lipset Revolution and Counter-Revolution Changeand Persistence in Social Structure (New York BasicBooks 1968) Table 8-2 pp 274-275 A change indegree if not in type of cleavage seems to be takingplace

tion with Germany and Italy ranking at inter-mediate levels37

There may be still another reason why Britaincontinues to maintain the traditional class-vot-

17 See Dennis and McCrone Preadult Developmentof Political Party Identification in Western Democ-racies Comparative Political Studies Vol 3 No 2(July 1970) pp 243-263 This evidence confirmsearlier findings see Philip E Converse and GeorgesDupeux in Campbell et ah Elections and the PoliticalOrder cf Philip E Converse Of Time and PartisanStability Comparative Political Studies Vol 2 No2 (July 1969) pp 139-171 In the latter two articlesConverse (and Dupeux) report that individuals whoknew their fathers party affiliation are more likelyto identify with a party themselves than are thosewhose fathers did not transmit a cue concerning partyidentification If citizens with a clear political partyidentification are relatively unlikely to shift their voteaccording to underlying values Table 14 may givea conservative estimate of the impact of value priori-ties on party choice the table deals exclusively wiihthose who report a definite party choice themselvesand received party preference cues from their parentsIn addition however Converse finds (in Of Time andPartisan Stability) that older cohorts tend to haverelatively strong attachments to given political partiesas a function of the number of years they have beeneligible to vote for the political party of their choicein free elections This suggests the possibility that atleast part of the relationship between value preferenceand party shift may be due to the greater liklihood ofolder respondents having acquisitive values andrelatively strong party loyalties This hypothesis mightbe tested by controlling for age in addition to theother controls in Table 14 When we do so the rela-tionship between value preferences and party shift doesnot seem to disappear but the highly skewed relation-ship between age and values reduces the number ofcases in some of the cells to the vanishing point Wecan apply another sort of test however based oncross-national comparisons Our 1968 data fromBritain France and Germany contain informationabout the strength of party identification The patternvaries a good deal from country to country In theBritish sample (where the present party system hasbeen established for nearly half a century) intensepartisan identification falls off regularly and sharplyas we move from oldest to youngest age group Theoldest British group contains four times as manystrong partisan identifiers as does the youngest groupIntense partisanship falls off regularly but less steeplyin the German sample (strong identifiers occurringtwice as frequently among the oldest group as amongthe youngest group) So far this is entirely consistentwith the pattern reported by Converse The Frenchdata however fit Converses model only if we regardthe present French party system as newly establishedpartisanship decreases only very slightly in the Frenchsample as we move from old to young French teen-agers are almost as likely to declare themselves strongpartisans as are the 60-year-olds While at other agelevels the French are least likely of the three nationali-ties to express a strong sense of party identificationamong this youngest group they show the highestproportion The relationship between intergenerationalparty shift and underlying value priorities noted in ourFrench sample cannot readily be attributed to theolder cohorts relatively strong attachment to existingpolitical partiesmdashyet value-linked intergenerationalparty shift seems to occur to a greater extent inFrance than in any of the other national samples

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ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

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these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 26: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1016 The American Political Science Review Vol 65

ing pattern of industrial society the British La-bour Party has never been a party of the Leftin the same sense as the Marxist parties on theContinent From the start it has been a partyof moderate reform rather than one of revolu-tion Thus there is less contrast between La-bour and Conservative in Britain than betweenLeft and Right on the Continent an embour-geoisified worker can continue to feel comfort-able in voting for the Labour Party38 whileconversely a post-bourgeois Englishman hasless incentive to switch from Conservative toLabour

For the time being (as Table 2 indicates)the acquisitive group is much larger thanthe post-bourgeois group in all of thesecountries in case anyone doubted it thesquares outnumber the swingers In practicalterms this suggests that the potential reser-voir of voters who might shift to the Right islarger than the potential base for the NewLeft But if our cross-temporal interpretationis correct this situation is in a processof rapid change Assuming intracohort sta-bility in value priorities39 a projection ofchanges due to recruitment and mortality basedon Table 5 suggests that the two pure groupsmight reach numerical paritymdashon the Conti-nentmdashwithin the next 20 years Given the factthat the post-bourgeois types tend to be highlyeducated they are likely to be better organizedand politically more active than the acquisitive-oriented group In terms of political effective-ness the two groups might reach parity withinsay the next 15 years (these projections applyto the European Community countries Britainappears to lag behind them by about tenyears)

The size of the partisan redistribution inFrance in 1968 may give an idea of the extent

Even relatively affluent English workers are likelyto remain staunch supporters of the Labour Party ac-cording to John H Goldthorpe David LockwoodFrank Beckhofer and Jennifer Platt see The AffluentWorker Political Attitudes and Behavior (CambridgeCambridge University Press 1968) Richard F Ham-ilton argues that the same was true of French workersduring the Fourth Republic he may be correct in re-gard to that period but our data indicate that the pat-tern has changed significantly during the Fifth Re-public See Hamilton Affluence and the French Work-er in the Fourth Republic (Princeton Princeton Uni-versity Press 1967)

At first glance the assumption of intracohortstability may seem unrealistic adult change does takeplace But for reasons indicated above it wouldprobably be rash to assume that the adult cohortswill necessarily become more acquisitive as they ageIn view of the uncertainty of the direction of possibleshifts within adult cohorts the assumption of intra-cohort stability may provide at least a useful firstapproximation

to whichmdashunder crisis conditionsmdasha similarrepolarization might take place in the othercountries at the present time But this processcan of course be influenced by situational fac-tors such as political leadership in the givencountries The levels of support for the SPD in-dicated in our 1970 survey suggest that WillyBrandt for example has succeeded in doingwhat the French Left notably failed to do in1968mdashto attract the post-bourgeois group with-out alienating the acquisitive types

In Western Europe as a whole the pro-spective social base for movements of radical so-cial change appears likely to increase sharplyduring the next two decades But in order to beeffective movements seeking radical changemust shape their tactics with an awareness ofcurrent realities In view of the wide prepon-derance which the acquisitives seem to holdover post-bourgeois respondents in Westernelectorates a Weatherman-type strategy (forexample) not only seems likely to be counter-productive in the short run to the extent that ithad any real impact on the economy it appar-ently would tend to be self-defeating in the longrun as well

The new Left-Right continuum resembles theold in that it pits forces of change againstthose of the status quomdashbut the values moti-vating change relate to life styles rather thanacquisition and the social bases supportingchange show a corresponding shift For thetime being the potential social base for theNew Left may be a distinct minority The oldervalue groups are still split however and a NewLeft could be politically effective through alli-ances with the Old Left which emphasize eco-nomic issuesmdasheven to some extent at theprice of playing down some of the expressiveissues which are most appealing to the NewLeft constituency Conversely when partisansof the New Left appear to threaten the basicsocial order (as in France in May 1968) theyemphasize a cleavage which isolates them fromboth factions of the acquisitive-oriented popu-lation they threaten to upset an apple cartwhich has for twenty years provided an unprec-edented supply of apples The post-bourgeoisgroup may contend that the apples are sourThey may be right But the difference in opin-ion springs from an ingrained difference intastes

The present essay has no doubt onlyscratched the surface in the analysis of inter-generational value changes within advanced in-dustrial societies Further efforts are needed indeveloping more accurate and more exhaustivemeasurements of such changes and in applying

Dow

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1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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Page 27: The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change ...doc.rero.ch/record/302881/files/S0003055400137426.pdf · 1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 993 its younger members)

1971 The Silent Revolution in Europe 1017

these measurements to a longitudinal data baseIn this early exploration we find a fair amountof evidence that our indicators of value pri-orities tap basic aspects of an individuals beliefsystem a number of other attitudinal itemsshow relatively great constraint in relation tothese value indicators and the response patternseems integrated into the social structure in away which suggests that these values are early-established and relatively stable Moreovercross-national differences in value choices havea fit with the economic history of these coun-tries over the past two generations which fur-ther seems to support this interpretation Itseems at least plausible to conclude that inter-generational change is taking place in the valuepriorities of West European populationsmdashandthat this change may have a significant long-term impact on their political behavior40

40 These findings seem to contradict some key pro-jections in the literature which focuses on analysis ofthe future Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener forexample contend that

There is a basic long-term multifold trend toward

1 Increasingly sensate (empirical this-worldly sec-ular humanistic pragmatic utilitarian contract-ual epicurean or hedonistic) cultures

2 Bourgeois bureaucratic meritocratic demo-cratic (and nationalistic) elites

My reading of the data implies that while these trendsmay have prevailed until recently certain aspects maybe undergoing a reversal in post-industrial societiesSpecifically I doubt that the elites of these societieswill become increasingly bourgeois meritocratic ornationalistic or that these cultures are likely to becomeincreasingly pragmatic or utilitarian Kahn and Wienermake a number of additional projections which dostrike me as likely to hold true see The Year 2000A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York Macmillan 1967) p 7

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