Autonomy, religiosity and national identification as determinants of life satisfaction: A theoretical and empirical model and its application to Japan

Jagodzinski Wolfgang ()
Additional contact information
Jagodzinski Wolfgang: Professor at the University of Cologne.

Contemporary Japan, 2011, vol. 23, issue 1, 93-127

Abstract: Modernization theories contrast traditional and advanced societies. In the former, religion and group identification – the identification with the ethnicity or the nation in particular – are means of integration and sources of happiness. Technological and economic developments undermine this base of mechanical solidarity and bring out individualism, self-expression and autonomy as new values. Happiness is now reached, if the autonomous citizen can successfully realize her/his goals. As theories of individualism and collectivism typically regard independence and autonomy as values of the individualistic cultural frame, it should be lower in those societies where collectivism is still prevalent. This would explain why happiness is relatively low in Japan.The first sections of the paper show that the key variable of these theories – i.e., the sense of autonomy – is not only logically distinct from independence and individualism but also empirically uncorrelated with indicators of the latter concepts. Furthermore, autonomy increases at best weakly with modernization. Though it does not meet the assumptions of modernization theories, autonomy is nevertheless a strong predictor of life satisfaction. The positive influence of religion and national identification, by contrast, is relatively weak. The low sense of autonomy can explain the level of life satisfaction in Japan fairly well.

Keywords: World Values Survey; Modernization Theory; Autonomy; Religiosity; National Identification; Life Satisfaction; Happiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/cj.2011.006 (text/html)

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:bpj:conjap:v:23:y:2011:i:1:p:93-127:n:6

DOI: 10.1515/cj.2011.006

Access Statistics for this article

Contemporary Japan is currently edited by Florian Coulmas

More articles in Contemporary Japan from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().