Political Science
Ronald F. Inglehart, Ph.D., is a political scientist at the University of Michigan. He is director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the public of over 80 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 90 percent of the world's population. The first wave of surveys for this project was carried out in 1981 and the latest wave will be completed in 2014. Since 2010, Inglehart has also been co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This laboratory has carried out surveys in Russia and eight ex-Soviet countries and is training Ph.D.-level students in quantitative cross-national research methods.
In the seventies Inglehart began developing an influential theory of intergenerational value change from materialist to post-materialist values that helped shape the Eurobarometer Surveys, the World Values Surveys and other cross-national survey projects. Building on this work, he subsequently developed a revised version of Modernization theory, Evolutionary Modernization Theory, which argues that economic development, welfare state institutions and the long peace between major powers since 1945, are reshaping human motivations in ways that have important implications concerning gender roles, sexual norms, the role of religion, economic behavior and the spread of democracy.
