Which Culture
Cultural Fallout? Immigration's Effect on Individualism
Claudia Williamson Kramer & Daniel Sánchez-Piñol Yulee
Southern Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does immigration reshape cultural values, particularly, individualism–collectivism? Immigrants bring diverse cultural values that may either reinforce or challenge individualistic norms, potentially altering a host country's economic performance and social cohesion. We test this using a measure of individualism from the Integrated Values Survey and immigrant stocks and net inflows from 1995 to 2015. Employing panel data models, cross-sectional regressions, and Mahalanobis matching, we find that immigration significantly increases country average individualism by 0.31–1.02 standard deviations, with consistent effects for developing country immigrants. These results support contact theory and cultural transmission mechanisms. Overall, our findings suggest immigration correlates with individualistic attitudes linked to economic growth and social progress, challenging concerns about cultural fallout.
Market orientation and national homicide rates
William Alex Pridemore & Meghan Rogers
Criminology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We studied the influence of market orientation on national homicide rates. Multiple theoretical traditions equate the development and dominance of markets with higher crime rates. Some traditional sociological theoretical claims, however, suggest market expansion should reduce violence. Elias argued that economic interconnectedness demands stable societies, increased sensitivity to others, and self-control. Durkheim maintained that greater division of labor and integration result in fewer offenses against the person, especially with the concomitant development of a religion of humanity. Further, empirical evidence from multiple fields shows that market integration positively covaries with fairness and prosociality, market-oriented societies are more averse to unethical behavior, and globalization reduces national homicide rates. We tested these competing hypotheses using panel data for 88 nations, 2000–2019. We obtained national homicide rates from the World Health Organization's Mortality Database and employed the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Index to operationalize market orientation. We used pooled cross-sectional models with fixed effects, controlling for common structural covariates of homicide rates. Results revealed a negative and significant association between market orientation and homicide rates, a substantively meaningful effect size, that the effect appears to be concentrated in nations with lower market orientation, and the findings remained consistent across several stability checks.
Rethinking Modernization and Value Change in China: Moral Decline or Emancipative Shift?
Xue Gong
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Modernization, particularly in Western contexts, is often conceptualized as a driver of emancipative value change; the Chinese experience offers a different narrative — one in which modernization is associated with the erosion of shared moral norms and the emergence of a so-called moral crisis. Despite these competing views, empirical research remains limited regarding whether modernization in China erodes shared moral norms or fosters emancipative value change. Using data from the World Values Survey conducted in China in 2007, 2012, and 2018, this study examines both perspectives by analyzing intergenerational differences in moral values and standards. It finds that, compared to pre-reform generations, post-reform generations exhibit higher moral standards and demonstrate more diverse and emancipative moral values. In addition, moral standards have increased over time across the general population. These results suggest that the so-called moral crisis in China should be understood as a transformation of morality rather than its decline. These findings help to clarify an influential concept, illuminate how China’s modernization shapes the moral outlook of its citizens, and contribute to comparative debates on socio-economic modernization and value change.
Lenin's Shadow on the Istanbul Convention: The Legacy of Communism and Attitudes Toward Violence Against Women in Europe
Naci Mocan & Nur Orak
NBER Working Paper, December 2025
Abstract:
The Istanbul Convention is an international treaty aimed at protecting women against violence. We employ survey datasets and investigate its effect on attitudes toward violence against women in Europe. Using difference-in-differences models we compare individuals in countries that signed and ratified the Convention with those in countries that signed but either never ratified or did so after the surveys were fielded. Entry into the Convention significantly reduced the likelihood that lower-educated individuals view violence against women as acceptable, but only in countries outside the former Eastern Bloc. In former Eastern Bloc countries, the Convention affected attitudes only among younger less-educated individuals who had limited exposure to communism -- those who were no older than teenagers when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. We show that younger cohorts in these countries tend to hold more individualistic and less pro-government attitudes and express greater trust in the courts and the justice system than older individuals. Finally, we find no effect of the Convention on attitudes toward other forms of norm-violating behavior, such as tax evasion, bribery, fare evasion, or drug use. These results indicate that the Convention had a targeted impact, and that its influence on shaping preferences depends on the broader cultural context which is itself shaped by institutions.
Ancestral Irrigation and Women's Political Empowerment
Roberto Ezcurra
Kyklos, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the adoption of irrigation agriculture during the preindustrial period is a predictor of contemporary cross-country variation in women's political empowerment. Countries whose populations historically relied on irrigation agriculture as their primary subsistence mode tend to have lower levels of women's political empowerment today, confirming the enduring impact of certain historical practices related to agriculture on contemporary gender inequality. This result remains unaltered after controlling for an extensive set of geographic, historical, and contemporary factors that may be correlated with both irrigation agriculture and women's political empowerment and is confirmed by an instrumental variable approach that exploits cross-country variation in irrigation suitability. The analysis also reveals that the contribution of ancestral irrigation to women's political empowerment has partly operated through its impact on the process of institutional development and the individualism–collectivism cultural divide. Furthermore, evidence from the second-generation immigrants in Europe suggests that cultural transmission is an additional channel linking ancestral irrigation with contemporary attitudes about the appropriate role of women in society.
Art as Data in Political History
Valentin Figueroa
MIT Working Paper, December 2025
Abstract:
Ongoing advances in machine learning are expanding opportunities to analyze large-scale visual data. In historical political economy, paintings from museums and private collections represent an untapped source of information. Before computational methods can be applied, however, it is essential to establish a framework for assessing what information paintings encode and under what assumptions it can be interpreted. This article develops such a framework, drawing on the enduring concerns of the traditional humanities. I describe three applications using a database of 25,000 European paintings from 1000CE to the First World War. Each application targets a distinct type of information conveyed in paintings (depicted content, communicative intent, and incidental information) and a cultural transformation of the early-modern period. The first revisits the notion of a European “civilizing process” — the internalization of stricter norms of behavior that occurred in tandem with the growth of state power — by examining whether paintings of meals show increasingly complex etiquette. The second analyzes portraits to study how political elites shaped their public image, highlighting a long-term shift from chivalric to more rational-bureaucratic representations of men. The third documents a long-term process of secularization, measured by the share of religious paintings, which began prior to the Reformation and accelerated afterward.
Individualism–Collectivism: Reconstructing Hofstede’s Dimension of Cultural Differences
Plamen Akaliyski et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individualism–collectivism (I-C), the most widely researched cultural dimension, is often equated with Hofstede’s pioneering nation scores. Concerns are growing about these scores’ validity, but subsequent research has not produced a widely accepted alternative. Here, we offer a refined theoretical conceptualization of I-C, we systematically reevaluate the validity of Hofstede’s I-C scores, and we report the development and validation of a new I-C index, covering 102 countries/territories inhabited by an estimated 88% of the world’s population. In Study 1, we document the inferior convergent and nomological validity of Hofstede’s I-C index, compared to subsequent measures. Hofstede’s scores substantially overestimate individualism in English-speaking countries and collectivism in East Asian societies, which we demonstrate can considerably bias research findings. In Study 2, we develop an authoritative, theory-driven I-C index, using nationally representative data from the World Values Survey and European Values Study, which shows excellent internal coherence, temporal stability, and strong evidence of convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity. Theorized facets of individualism — freedom (vs. conformity), tolerance of differences (vs. exclusion), and equality (vs. discrimination) — form a coherent and stable dimension at the cultural level of analysis. Individualism is higher in societies with better existential security (e.g., socioeconomic development, stable institutions) and is not associated with greater selfishness, anomie, or competitive beliefs and values. Relying on outdated indices may perpetuate cultural stereotypes and underpin flawed theorizing. Scholars should use theoretically appropriate and up-to-date measures of societal culture when seeking to understand global variation in human psychological functioning.
Individualism and Economic Freedom
Lewis Davis & Nabamita Dutta
Kyklos, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom Index (EFI) constitute, as its proponents claim, a coherent measure of a classically liberal approach to economic governance? Noting the central role of individualism to liberalism, we provide evidence on this claim by investigating the empirical relationship between individualism and the EFI. Our findings suggest that there is a strong, positive relationship between individualism and the EFI. This relationship is robust to the use of alternative measures of individualism, to controls for a wide range of historical, cultural and institutional variables, and to the use of instrumental variable methods to address measurement and endogeneity issues. We also find evidence of a strong positive, causal relationship between individualism and four of the five components of the EFI. While these findings broadly support the claim that the EFI provides a measure of a classically liberal approach to economic governance, they also present challenges the empirical literature on the EFI. In particular, it is unclear whether liberal economic policies or the individualist values that underlie these policies are responsible for the positive relationship between the EFI and measures of social welfare.
Moral Regulation and Cultural Production: Evidence from Hollywood
Ruixue Jia & David Strömberg
NBER Working Paper, December 2025
Abstract:
Moral regulation is widespread across societies, yet its consequences have seldom been examined empirically. We study the Hays Code (July 1934–1960s), which imposed systematic moral guidelines on American cinema. Using a regression-discontinuity design, with non-U.S. films providing a comparison group, we find that the moral compliance of U.S. films rose sharply after 1935 and remained high for two decades. The Code also reshaped protagonists and political tone: protagonists became less likely to be women or working class, and political tones grew more conservative. Filmmakers adapted both by increasing compliance within genres and by shifting across them: less-compliant Drama declined while more-compliant Western and Action rose. Companies with a larger market size and immigrant film directors exhibited stronger responses. These findings reveal how moral constraint, market, and identity jointly shape cultural production and how well-intentioned moral regulation can generate broad and often unintended spillovers.