Eurobarometer: The Dynamics of European Public Opinion Essays in Honour of Jacques-René Rabier

by Ronald Inglehart (Editor)

This book traces changes in the social and political orientations of the publics of Britain, France, Italy, Spain, West Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, Greece and Luxembourg from 1970 to 1988. It charts the persistence of distinctive national outlooks in many domains, alongside the emergence of a European consensus within the framework of an increasingly integrated European Community. Written by leading social scientists from Western Europe and the United States, this book helps chart the future for Europe after 1992.

411 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1991

About the author

Ronald F. Inglehart (born September 5, 1934) was a political scientist at the University of Michigan. He was director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 80 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 90 percent of the world's population. The first wave of surveys for this project was carried out in 1981 and the latest wave was completed in 2014. Since 2010 Inglehart was co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow and St Petersburg. This laboratory has carried out surveys in Russia and eight ex-Soviet countries and is training Phd.-level students in quantitative cross-national research methods.

In the seventies Inglehart began developing an influential theory of Generational Replacement causing intergenerational value change from materialist to postmaterialist values that helped shape the Eurobarometer Surveys, the World Values Surveys and other cross-national survey projects. Building on this work, he subsequently developed a revised version of Modernization theory, Evolutionary Modernization Theory, which argues that economic development, welfare state institutions and the long peace between major powers since 1945, are reshaping human motivations in ways that have important implications concerning gender roles, sexual norms, the role of religion, economic behavior and the spread of democracy.