After World War II, post-industrial societies developed unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security, with rising standards of living fuelled by steady economic growth, despite occasional cyclical downturns. Governments in these societies expanded the role of the welfare state to provide greater social protection for the worst-off citizens; more recently, contracting out services to the non-profit and private sectors, under state regulation.
In conditions of greater security, Inglehart theorizes, public concern about the material issues of unemployment, healthcare, and housing no longer takes top priority. Instead in postindustrial societies the public has given increasingly high priority to quality of life issues, individual autonomy and self-expression, the need for environmental protection. Dalton theorizes that this process has given rise to a new form of citizen politics, making greater demands for direct participation in the policy-making process through activities such as petitions, protests and demonstrations.
Most importantly, the traditional party-voter loyalties, and the social identities upon which these are founded, can be expected to erode in postindustrial societies, to be replaced by more contingent patterns of party support based upon particular leaders, issues and events.
Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior
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Cultural Modernization Theory and ‘Habits of the Heart’
2. The impact of modernization on political culture
The account offered by Ronald Inglehart emphasized that societal developments have profound consequences for political culture, in particular that postindustrial societies are characterized by an extensive value shift, with important implications for the size of a new citizen politics36. After World War II, post-industrial societies developed unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security, with rising standards of living fuelled by steady economic growth, despite occasional cyclical downturns. Governments in these societies expanded the role of the welfare state to provide greater social protection for the worst-off citizens; more recently, contracting out services to the non-profit and private sectors, under state regulation. In conditions of greater security, Inglehart theorizes, public concern about the material issues of unemployment, healthcare, and housing no longer takes top priority. Instead in postindustrial societies the public has given increasingly high priority to quality of life issues, individual autonomy and self-expression, the need for environmental protection. Dalton theorizes that this process has given rise to a new form of citizen politics, making greater demands for direct participation in the policy-making process through activities such as petitions, protests and demonstrations.
Most importantly, the traditional party-voter loyalties, and the social identities upon which these are founded, can be expected to erode in postindustrial societies, to be replaced by more contingent patterns of party support based upon particular leaders, issues and events. Many studies, discussed fully in chapters 5 and 6, have documented trends in partisan and social dealignment occurring in many post-industrial societies. Growing levels of education and cognitive skills, and the access this provides to a diverse range of information sources via the mass media, are thought to play a particularly important role in transforming the basis of individual voting behavior, representing a shift from the politics of loyalties towards the politics of choice. Moreover, because the causes are essentially societal factors — exemplified by changes in educational levels, access to the mass media, and the decline of traditional political organizations — these processes are widely assumed to affect all post-industrial societies equally, whether the Netherlands or Britain, the United States or Sweden, irrespective of the particular electoral rules operating in each political system. If processes of societal modernization have indeed shaped political cultures and patterns of electoral behavior, then, all other things being equal, this should be evident by contrasts in voting behavior and political representation among societies at different levels of human development, in particular we would expect to find substantial differences between industrial and postindustrial societies.
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Acrobat/APSA2003%20Electoral%20Engineering.pdf
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