WVS Cultural Map: 2023 Version Released

The cultural map methodology developed by the late WVSA Founder Ronald Inglehart and the WVSA Vice-President Christian Welzel asserts that there are two major dimensions of cross cultural variation in the world: traditional values versus secular-rational values and survival values versus self-expression values. The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World illustrates that -despite many nuanced differences--human belief systems boil down to these two major dimensions of cross-cultural variation. The global cultural map shows how scores of societies are located on these two dimensions. The first dimension measures how important a role religious doctrine plays in societies, with secular values indicating a largely reduced role of organized religion. The second dimension, by contrast, indicates how autonomous from kinship obligations individuals in a society are in their life planning, with self-expression values emphasizing high individual autonomy. Consecutive waves of the World Values Survey from the early 1980s until today have replicated these two dimensions with astoundingly stable moral positions of countries and their larger culture zones to each other. Yet, there is also movement on the map: As populations become more prosperous, educated, live longer and give birth to fewer children, their descendants become more secular and self-expressive in their moral values, thus moving from the lower left to the upper right on the cultural map. Hence, despite enduring cultural differences, humanity as a whole is in the middle of an emancipatory moral progression.

More information about the theory and methodology behind the map design is available in the section "Findings and Insights" at the WVSA website.