Where (in the World) Do Social Liberals Live?

Last week I stumbled across a fascinating book called Freedom Rising, written in 2013 by the German political psychologist Christian Welzel.

Welzel’s book didn’t receive much attention outside of academia; it wasn’t reviewed by the New York Times and has only 14 ratings on Amazon. Nevertheless, I’m inclined to agree with the opinion of one reviewer who said Freedom Rising is “a singularly impressive study of how social modernization can transform societies and their citizens.”

Thirty Years of Data from 95 Countries

In his book, Welzel relied on data provided by the World Values Survey (WVS) to estimate the degree to which citizens of different countries are socially liberal or socially conservative. (The WVS has been polling people in nearly 100 countries since 1981; it uses large, nationally representative samples and covers all of the world’s major cultural zones.)

To be clear, Welzel didn’t use the term “socially liberal” in his study. He used the term “emancipative values,” which refer to individual liberties, not political leftism.

In his analysis, Welzel discovered that people tended to give like-minded answers to a particular subset of WVS items. Specifically, some respondents consistently endorsed “liberal” (emancipative) values in response to items that asked about gender equality, personal choices, political expression, and childrearing. Others consistently endorsed “conservative” values in response to the same items.

Because a given respondent tended to answer these items in similar fashion, Welzel combined each person’s scores across the items into a single composite index and then compared index scores over time and across nations.

Welzel’s Major Findings

Welzel discovered that social liberals and social conservatives are not randomly scattered around the planet. To the contrary, liberals and conservatives tend to live in specific regions or culture zones. This by itself isn’t especially surprising, but it’s the kind of finding that grabs the attention of researchers who study geographical psychology.

The most socially liberal nations—Scandinavian countries and the U.K., for example—are found in the Protestant Western Europe culture zone. The second most liberal rank includes wealthy, English-speaking countries such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The third rank includes Catholic countries in Southern Europe.

The most conservative nations are found in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa. Slightly less conservative culture zones are sub-Saharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia. Nations in other regions—Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Latin America, and East Asia—generally fall in the middle ranks.[1]

Welzel also discovered that the relative ranks of the regions have changed hardly at all over the past 40 years. The most liberal culture zones in 1981 (the year of the first World Values Survey) are still the most liberal zones today. The same is true for the most conservative and middle-ranked regions. With a few minor exceptions, every zone still occupies its original position on the ladder.

Most surprising of all is that in every part of the world, countries have steadily become more socially liberal since 1981. Slowly but surely, year after year, WVS respondents endorse gender equality and individual liberties at a slightly higher rate than the year before. They also are more likely to endorse the rule of law and a childrearing philosophy that emphasizes the importance of inculcating autonomy over obedience.

The consequence of this apparently inexorable trend is that people living in the Islamic Middle East today (think Iran) are more socially liberal than people who lived in Scandinavia in the 1960s. (Welzel arrived at this conclusion by extrapolating the observed trends back in time. You may think that’s a bit sketchy. After reading Welzel’s rationale, I don’t.)

Education, Information, and Institutions

Identifying the causal factors that have produced these orderly regional differences is, of course, challenging (because correlation does not imply causation). Welzel, however, made a valiant effort and demonstrated statistically that the single best predictor of social liberalism—much better than GDP, which was my first guess—is a nation’s score on the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, a composite measure that includes a nation’s literacy rate, high school and college enrollments, access to computers and the internet, number of patents issued, and more.

In sum, it appears that socially liberal values are bound to arise in nations and regions that foster public education, access to information, and strong institutions. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker likes to remind us, these byproducts of the Enlightenment are largely responsible for the tremendous progress we’ve made in helping people lead safer, healthier, wealthier, happier lives.

[1] Welzel’s original labels for world regions—Sinic East, Reformed West, and others—are not easily interpreted, so I have borrowed the labels used by Steven Pinker in his superb book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.