World Values Survey Research Papers (original) (raw)

The landslide victory of the Republican Party in the United States of America on 5 November 2024, unexpected by most observers, clearly showed that the Democrats fought the election on issues such as abortion and gender, while increasing numbers of immigrant and African American voters voted Republican in the Senate and House of Representatives, and for Republican candidate Donald Trump to become president.

One of the real ironies of the current situation is that, in an era of global migration and increasing foreign-born populations in the major Western countries, it is precisely immigrant and ethnic minority populations that hold religious and moral views that are compatible with the teachings of the major world religions, while those sectors of Western society that favour immigration and multiculturalism often dramatically favour "giving up on God", as the leading researcher on global values, the late Ronald F. Inglehart (1934 - 2021; Inglehart, 2020b), has put it.

This book therefore attempts to estimate in which countries and territories, and among the adherents of which of the more than 400 political parties around the world for which data are available, the religious norms of the major religious communities centred on the "Ten Commandments" are still observed.

Our book is therefore aimed not only at the academic community, but also at think tanks, international and national government agencies, transnational banks and corporations, and religious communities.

In our increasingly multicultural, multiethnic and multipolar world system, religious communities of different denominations lament the loss of religious values generally associated with the "Ten Commandments" in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Although a number of social scientists, most notably Inglehart, 2020; Inglehart, & Appel, 1989; Lesthaeghe, & Surkyn, 1988; Norris, & Inglehart, 2006; Pettersson, 1994; Tang, 2016, have been aware of the need for empirical multivariate studies on the observance of the Ten Commandments among global publics, explicit multivariate empirical studies on this topic have been far less frequent. In this type of literature, the work of the Maltese Jesuit Father Anthony Abela (Abela, 1993a, 1993b) stands out, but also Forsyth, O'boyle, & McDaniel, 2008; Hagenaars, & Halman, 1989; Hofstede, 2006; Tormos, 2019; and Tosi, & Oncini, 2020 provided key insights. However, none of these studies focused on the totality of the available data from the World Values Survey and none of these studies was recent enough to be able to say that research has covered the topic of quantitative multivariate analysis of global adherence to the Ten Commandments in sufficient detail. And to make matters still more urgent, there is also a fundamental lack of data in research on the observance of the Ten Commandments by the supporters of the world's political parties.

Our approach throughout this book is based on an advanced index construction methodology and uses twenty-one items from the latest 2019-2022 editions of the world's largest publicly available opinion surveys, the World Values Survey, and the European Values Survey, to determine whether the public and supporters of various political parties in 82 countries still follow the rules of religion that can be deduced from the publicly available data. The countries with complete data included in our research are Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Macau SAR, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Myanmar, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Northern Ireland, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan ROC, Thailand, Tunisia, Ukraine, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zimbabwe.

We make available an electronic, freely accessible Appendix on ResearchGate and Academia EDU which is structured in the following way:

Table of contents 2
Appendix 1: The non-parametric Religious Morality Indexfor the political parties in the world by party preference and country 3

Appendix 2: The ranking of the supporters of different political parties around the world according to the non-parametric Index of Religious Morality 16

Appendix 3: The parametric Religious Morality Indexfor the political parties in the world by party preference and country 29

Appendix 4: The ranking of the supporters of different political parties around the world according to the parametric Index of Religious Morality 53

Appendix 5: The choropleth maps and Kuznets curves of global values 66

Appendix 6: The question items of the World Values Survey 108

Appendix 7: Electronic background data availability for this study 119

Appendix 8: Country and territory codes and abbreviations (Alpha 2-code and Alpha 3-code) 123