The post-materialist economic freedom puzzle

Pál Czeglédi ()
Additional contact information
Pál Czeglédi: University of Debrecen

International Review of Economics, 2024, vol. 71, issue 1, No 6, 99-121

Abstract: Abstract Countries with a higher proportion of people with post-materialist values are freer economically than those with a lower proportion. The reasons why this is puzzling are that post-materialist values are not obviously more supportive to economic freedom than materialist ones, and that post-materialism correlates negatively with market friendliness in the West and positively outside it. The paper argues that seeing market attitudes as opinions with which people express their materialist or post-materialist identity, an equilibrium in which post-materialists are market friendly and another in which they are market unfriendly are both possible. A change in the proportion of post-materialists, however, can easily trigger a shift from one equilibrium to the other. Regressions with data from the Integrated Values Survey confirm that post-materialists are more market unfriendly when their proportion in society is high enough, but this negative effect is mitigated by their political identity, the expressiveness of the individuals themselves, the ideology of the political parties in their country, and culture. The argument casts some doubt on the claim that post-materialism is a determinant of the institutions and policies of economic freedom.

Keywords: Post-materialism; Economic freedom; Expressive behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 E14 P10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12232-023-00436-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:inrvec:v:71:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1007_s12232-023-00436-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cy/journal/12232/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s12232-023-00436-5

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Economics is currently edited by Luigino Bruni

More articles in International Review of Economics from Springer, Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations (HEIRS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().