Individualistic Values, Institutional Trust, and Interventionist Attitudes

Hans Pitlik and Martin Rode

No 515, WIFO Working Papers from WIFO

Abstract: Ever since Max Weber (1930) uncovered the cultural origins of capitalism, a common denominator for explanations of economic development is that "individualistic values" provide a more favourable background for promoting the wealth of nations. This paper investigates the impact of individualist values on personal attitudes towards government intervention, as a potential link of culture and formal institutions. We consider two key components of an "individualistic culture" to be particularly relevant for attitude formation, namely values related to self-direction and self-determination. Results indicate that both elements of individualistic values are associated negatively with interventionist preferences. Interestingly, effects of self-direction values on intervention attitudes are much weaker though, than the effects of a strong belief in self-determination. Moreover, the effects of self-direction on intervention preferences are mitigated through higher trust in state actors and lower confidence in major companies, while that does not appear to be the case for self-determination values.

Keywords: government intervention; individualism; institutional trust; preference formation; self-determination; self-direction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pke and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wifo.ac.at/wwa/pubid/58752 abstract (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Individualistic values, institutional trust, and interventionist attitudes (2017)
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:wfo:wpaper:y:2016:i:515

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in WIFO Working Papers from WIFO Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Florian Mayr ().