Forty years ago, almost half of the Swedish population thought abortion was justified. Today, three-quarters of citizens no longer have a problem with it. In India, by contrast, a quarter of citizens were content with abortion 40 years ago, but only 16 percent are today.
It is just one example of the gap in norms and values that has deepened worldwide over the past 40 years, two American sociologists report in the journal Nature Communications. While citizens of Western countries have become increasingly liberal in recent decades, non-Western regions of the world have generally become more conservative. The (already limited) acceptance of homosexuality, abortion and euthanasia has fallen further, while issues such as trust in the army and the importance attached to a religious upbringing score higher points. Tolerance for corruption and government fraud has also increased in non-Western countries, the Americans noted.
The results contradict the expectation that globalization and the associated growing prosperity would bring democratization and emancipation worldwide. The researchers found evidence to the contrary in Hong Kong and Canada, where prosperity increased equally between 2000 and 2020. But while acceptance of homosexuality has increased significantly in Canada, this has been much less the case in Hong Kong.
At the University of Chicago, Joshua Conrad Jackson and Danila Medvedev analyzed data from the World Values Survey, a repeated survey of more than 400,000 people in 76 countries between 1981 and 2022. The surveys gauged citizens’ views on 40 value-related issues, such as permissibility of homosexuality or prostitution, the importance of a religious upbringing of children or the desirability of political action.
While most Western countries have become (even) more liberal in these matters, this is not the case for most non-Western countries in the survey. Morals have become significantly more conservative in Iraq, Morocco, Rwanda and Hong Kong, among others, the researchers note. But European countries such as Hungary and Poland have also become considerably more conservative in their norms and values.
China and Russia
Werner Schirmer, sociologist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, is not “super surprised” by the conclusions of the American study. “In the 1950s and 60s, many sociologists still thought that the American model of society would conquer the world. Rising prosperity in non-Western countries would lead to citizens adopting Western norms and values and emancipating towards greater individualism and self-determination.”
“Nobody believes that anymore today. Modernization and prosperity clearly do not automatically lead to a more liberal society. Just look at China and Russia: how radically anti-Western those countries are today, despite their increased prosperity.”
Modernization can take a country in more than one direction, says Schirmer, not just towards democracy and individualization. “Some religions are also easier to reconcile with emancipation. Protestantism, the religion that formed the basis of Anglo-Saxon societies such as the US and Great Britain, is an example of this. More than Catholicism, it offered space for the interests of individuals, even if this was at the expense of the interests of the collective. Protestantism also had less difficulty than Catholicism with individuals’ pursuit of wealth and power.”
Previous studies showing a global increase in acceptance of homosexuality noted that liberalization was slower or did not happen in Muslim countries, sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet bloc. The analyzes are consistent with the findings of the current study: that opinions on the justifiability of homosexuality have diverged over time.
A striking result of the study is that citizens’ tolerance for tax evasion, fare dodging and bribing government officials has increased. Schirmer is not surprised. “In countries where a clan mentality prevails, individuals are primarily loyal to their own group. They see themselves as a cog that helps keep the wheels of their own clan turning, not as someone who functions on their own in a larger society. For them, the state is an abstract third party that enjoys less trust than their own group. Things that Westerners find immoral are not seen by them as something wrong, but as a service to their own group.”
Multicultural societies
What do the findings of the American researchers mean for Western countries with a strong migration influx from non-Western countries? Are the norms and values within such multicultural societies also becoming increasingly divergent?
“The researchers didn’t figure that out,” says Schirmer – the World Values Survey they based on compares countries with each other, not regions or social groups within a country. “It would be interesting to set up such a survey in Flanders,” says the sociologist, “and to compare norms and values in, for example, urban and rural areas. Or to gauge the difference between the working class and highly educated citizens. The researchers did not look at that in this study either.”
