Scott C. Flanagan

Value Change in Industrial Societies

Ronald Inglehart has argued that, while most of the major political parties in Western countries tend to be aligned along a social class–based axis, support for new political movements and new political parties largely reflects the tension between materialist and postmaterialist goals and values. This has presented something of a dilemma to the traditional parties, and helps account for the decline of social-class voting. Scott Flanagan takes issue with Ingleharts interpretation in several particulars. Although their views converge in many respects, Flanagan urges conceptual reorientations and adumbrates a different interpretation of post–World War II political development in Europe and Japan.

Changing Values in Advanced Industrial Societies Inglehart's Silent Revolution from the Perspective of Japanese Findings

Ronald Inglehart has demonstrated the important political and behavioral implications of value change in advanced industrial societies. In an effort to enhance our understanding of this politically relevant “silent revolution,” an alternate theory of value change is presented, contrasting Ingleharts “needs theory” approach with a “functional constraints” theoretic construct. It is then argued that both kinds of value change are taking place, the first a change in the priorities attached to economic as opposed to noneconomic, value issues as measured by a materialism-nonmaterialism scale, and the second a change in basic social value preferences as measured by an authoritarian-libertarian scale. It is further argued that Ingleharts acquisitive-postbourgeois value scale combines both of these value priority and value preference dimensions. Relying primarily on Japanese data, it is demonstrated that these two subdimensions have sharply contrasting properties in both their causal origins and behavioral properties and hence are preferably kept distinct. Finally it is shown that the alternate theory and measurement of value change presented here overcome several problems in the Inglehart approach.

The New Politics, Culture Wars, and The Authoritarian-Libertarian Value Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies

The plurality of conflicting worldviews that are now found in the Western advanced industrial democracies has created values and belief systems that are markedly at odds with each other, which in turn has projected a whole new set of new politics or culture war issues onto the political agenda. The authors have empirically identified an authoritarian-libertarian dimension of value change that captures an important dimension of this shift. They demonstrate that the shift from authoritarian to libertarian values is related to (a) growing levels of social and political alienation along a number of key attitudinal dimensions; (b) a dramatic shift in positions on the key culture wars issues; and (c) higher participatory levels and more assertive modes of political involvement, yielding asymmetric mobilization around the culture wars issues. The study is based on the 1990 wave of the World Values Survey in the 12 largest and most affluent Western nations.

Parties under stress: Realignment and dealignment in advanced industrial societies

The findings of a forthcoming study of electoral change in advanced industrial democracies are reviewed. These findings point to broad‐based processes of change that can be organised around two models ‐a social cleavage model of realignment and a functional model of dealignment. Both types of change are at work in most party systems. Surprisingly, their impact on future party system change is likely to be more reinforcing than contradictory in altering the context of party competition and moving parties further away from the responsible party model.

Value Change and Democratic Reform in Japan and Korea

This study explores the underlying causes of the processes of democratic reform in Japan and Korea over the past decade. In both nations, elite-challenging pressures from below have been the stimulus forcing reforms on the governing elites. For this reason, changes in mass attitudes and values become a crucial explanatory variable in accounting for recent political reforms. The authors discuss the pattern of political development in these two nations and their theory of how and why values are changing from an authoritarian to libertarian set of attitudinal orientations. This pattern of value change has been eroding the traditional tolerance of the mass publics in these two nations for authoritarian and corrupt practices. The authors empirically demonstrate how and why values have been changing and how these changes are related to increasing levels of elite-challenging protest potential and leftist reform-oriented attitudes.

The Japanese voter

This survey of the major factors that influence voting behaviour in Japan demonstrates, through a wide range of examples, that there are recognizable bases of comparison between Japanese and Western voting behaviour. It also produces a number of contrasts with voting in the West.

National Aid and Local Autonomy in Japan The Impact of Central Financing on Prefectural Expenditures

It has long been believed that local autonomy is virtually nonexistent in Japan, but few empirical studies have tested for the impact of central controls over local financing on local spending priorities. In an analysis of budgetary data for Japans 46 prefectures it is found that national aid has a weaker direct stimulation effect in Japan than in the United States, and that national aid has been used by local Japanese governments to release revenues, derived from internal sources, from ongoing programs in favor of new local priorities. Moreover, the high-income/low-dependency prefectures are shown to have shifted their spending priorities to innovative new programs in advance of national policy directives, particularly during periods of high economic growth. In addition, the overall strength of the progressive parties in a prefecture is associated with a shift in local priorities from public works to welfare spending. Both income and party have independent effects and in the late 1960s and early 1970s furnished several urban, high-income, progressive prefectures with the capacity and motivation to implement innovative, welfare-oriented policies. These findings suggest a need to revise our model of the central/local linkages in the Japanese policy-making process from a unitary, highly centralized depiction to a more two-way interaction.