Religious zones, economic development and modern value orientations: Individual versus contextual effects

This paper addresses the debate concerning the influence of cultural and economic contexts on the adoption of modern values by individual members of society. We have applied for this purpose a multilevel analysis (HLM), using the World Value Survey (WVS) and European Value Survey (EVS) data bank for 36 of the countries included in the 2000 wave. The cultural and economic higher-level variables are represented by religious zones (Protestant, Catholic, Ex-Socialist Catholic and Islamic) and level of economic development (Real Gross Domestic Product per Capita). The individual-level variables include age, gender, schooling and religiousness (N = 51792). The dependent variables consist of two measures: political liberal values (PLV) and social liberal values (SLV). The results of the HLM analysis indicate that although most of the variance in both measures derives from differences in individual characteristics across countries, there is also strong evidence for contextual effects of religious zones and economic development, when each factor is examined by itself. Yet because of multi-colinearity, we cannot estimate the effects of the two higher-level variables independently of each other. We end by discussing the theoretical and methodological implications of our findings.