Honorary Speakers
Religion's Sudden Decline: What is Causing It and Comes Next?
April 13th, 15:30-17:00 (GMT+3)
The most recent book of Ronald Inglehart (Oxford University Press, 2020) shows that secularization has recently accelerated in most countries. It presents a theory why it happens at this particular stage of modernization. It then tests this theory with the data collected in seven rounds of the World Values Survey between 1981 and 2019 in more than 100 countries covering all cultural zones and more than 90 per cent of the world's population.
A Test of the Revised Minkov-Hofstede Model of Culture: Mirror Images of Subjective and Objective Culture Across Nations and the 50 U.S. States
April 14th, 12:00-13:30 (GMT+3)
Various models of subjective culture (measures of self-reports) have been proposed since Hofstede's original work but none of them have been validated by showing that they have analogues in objective culture (measures of societal practices). Inspired by Bardi and Schwartz's discovery that Schwartz's individual-level circumplex values model has an exact equivalent in a model of behaviours, we developed a test for the purpose of validating models of culture. We apply this test to Minkov's revised two-dimensional variant of Hofstede's subjective-culture model, consisting of individualism-collectivism (IDV-COLL) and flexibility-monumentalism (FLX-MON) (formerly "long-term orientation"), as Fog recently found that an analogue to this model incorporates and summarizes all major validated models and dimensions of national culture. We analyze national measures of important social practices associated empirically and theoretically with IDV-COLL and FLX-MON: transparency-corruption, gender equality, political freedom, road death tolls, homicide rates, family structures, innovation rates, and educational effort and achievement. These yielded close analogues to IDV-COLL and FLX-MON, with similar factor structures across nations and across the 50 US states, explicable in terms of IDV-COLL, FLX-MON, and life-history strategy (LHS) theories. Thus, subjective culture structures have mirror images in objective culture structures. This provides validation for our test, for the Minkov-Hofstede two-dimensional model of culture, for the use of nations and sub-national political entities as units of cultural analysis, as well as for IDV-COLL, FLX-MON, and LHS theories.
The Impact of Election Campaigns on National Election Outcomes
April 15th, 12:00-13:30 (GMT+3)
Abstract TBA.
The Cool Water Effect: The Geo-Climatic Origin of the West’s Emancipatory Drive
April 15th, 12:00-13:30 (GMT+3)
Western civilization exhibits an emancipatory drive towards liberating developmental outcomes that promote wealth, individualism and democracy. We present evidence suggesting that this emancipatory drive originates in the West’s distinct geo-climatic configuration: the Cool Water condition (i.e., the combination of cool seasons with the abundance of fresh water). The Cool Water condition bestows existential autonomies on nuclear families, which infuses into societal development an emancipatory dynamic. Applying multiple quantitative methods to observational data at the country, provincial and individual levels, the Cool Water condition powerfully predicts emancipatory developmental outcomes, past and present—controlling for plausible confounders.
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