On The Foundations of Democracy

New book co-authored by IUB professor Chris Welzel

The book Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy – The Human Development Sequence, published at Cambridge University Press by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, illuminates the cultural ground on which democracies emerge and flourish. The book will be available in Europe on October 20, 2005.

[ Oct 17, 2005]  The volume explores the emergence and consolidation of democracies in the broad theoretical perspective of human development, showing that democratization is part of a broader process of expanding human choice. The extensively illustrated analyses are based on massive evidence from the World Values Surveys which represent 85 percent of the world population over a time span of almost 30 years. The authors demonstrate that economic development gives rise to widespread emphasis on human self-expression, which turns out to be the single most crucial factor in helping democracies to emerge where they are not yet in place and to become more effective where they already exist. The authors also make predictions in which direction the value systems of given societies will move and how this might affect democratic institutions.

Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science and program director at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Author of more than 200 publications he is the president of the World Values Survey Association. Christian Welzel is Professor of Political Science and program coordinator at IUB. Author of some 60 publications he is a member of the executive committee of the World Values Survey Association.