Modernization and postmodernization

Ronald Inglehart argues that economic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and even, to some extent, predictable patterns. This is a controversial claim. It implies that some trajectories of socioeconomic change are more likely than others - and consequently that certain changes are foreseeable. Once a society has embarked on industrialization, for example, a whole syndrome of related changes - from mass mobilization to diminishing differences in gender roles - is likely to appear. But industrialization is not the end of history. Advanced industrial…