Intragenerational stability of postmaterialism in Germany, the Netherlands and the United States

Inglehart's thesis of the ‘Silent Revolution’ states that the priorities of Western publics have gradually shifted from materialist toward postmaterialist values. An important aspect of this thesis is the socialization hypothesis, predicting that one's (post)-materialist values are stable during adulthood. This paper tests this hypothesis using panel data for the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. For this purpose several multiple indicator two-wave models aredeveloped including (i) a correction for the dependency between the indicators (because of the ranking of the items) and (ii) i... Mehr ...