[
Jun
21, 2003]
Ronald Inglehardt, from the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, spoke on the topic of "Cultural Change, Islam and Democratization."
Professor Inglehart
Ron Inglehart as well as some famous German political scientists, including Max Kaase, Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Franz Urban Pappi, have been socialized in the tradition of the Michigan school. The cooperation between Inglehart, Kaase and Klingemann goes far back into the 1970s, when the Political Action Study (a milestone in political culture research) was conducted. Inglehart and Kaase are also linked through tough academic disputes on the evidence of post-materialistic value change--with one of these disputes recently been published in the American Political Science Review (the flagship among political science journals).
Inglehart became well-known for his book "The Silent Revolution" (1977) in which he unfolded the theory of post-materialistic value change in Western societies. His recent work, however, reaches far beyond the horizon of Western societies. Based on the World Values Surveys, whose principal coordinator he is, Inglehart elaborated a global cultural map in which different cultural zones are located according to the peoples' prevailing value orientations. When I met Inglehart for the first time in 1998, he felt immediately attracted by my theory of Human Development. Since this time, we co-authored several articles on the relationship between political culture, democracy and transitions to democracy. Inglehart is visiting IUB because we currently co-author (together with Hans-Dieter Klingemann) a book on Cultural Foundations of Democracy. I
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