World Values Survey Association Announces the Winner of the 2025 Ronald F. Inglehart Best Book Award on Political Culture and Values
The World Values Survey Association is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2025 Ronald F. Inglehart Best Book Award on Political Culture and Values, established to honor the scholarly legacy of Ronald F. Inglehart (1934–2021), founder of the World Values Survey and one of the most influential social scientists of the modern era.
Ronald Inglehart transformed the study of political culture through his pioneering research on value change, modernization, democratization, religion, subjective well-being, and human development. His work demonstrated the central role of cultural values in shaping political, economic, and social outcomes and inspired generations of scholars across disciplines. The Ronald F. Inglehart Best Book Award recognizes outstanding scholarly books that advance these traditions of inquiry and contribute to our understanding of political culture, values, and social change in comparative perspective.
The 2025 competition brought together an intellectually diverse collection of books addressing some of the most important contemporary questions in comparative social science. The nominated works examined issues ranging from religion, morality, and public opinion to migration, democratization, political trust, cultural heritage, civilizational development, and identity formation. Together, they reflect the breadth and vitality of contemporary research on values and political culture.
The books nominated for the 2025 award were:
- Raffi Kortoshian, A State Policy of Vandalism in Azerbaijan
- Svitlana Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian–Russian Case
- Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan T. Cragun, Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society
- Amy Adamczyk, Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-National Public Opinion about Abortion
- Elber Oreste Borrego Almaguer, Five Months of Agony: Love, Politics and Disappointments
- Asha Gupta, Happiness and Beyond: The Jain Way and Other Perspectives
- Tomer Persico, In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea
- Alexander Kustov, In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular
- Lianjiang Li, Political Trust in China
- Ihor Kondratiev, Perspectives on European Civilization: The Ukrainian Context
- Christian Welzel, Stefan Kruse, Lennart Brunkert, and Steven A. Brieger, The Cool Water Effect: The Geo-Climatic Source of Western Exceptionalism
The Award Jury consisted of Professor Anu Realo, Professor Yilmaz Esmer, and Professor Birol Yesilada, distinguished scholars whose own contributions have significantly advanced the comparative study of values, public opinion, political culture, and social change.
Following an extensive review process, the Jury unanimously selected Amy Adamczyk’s Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-National Public Opinion about Abortion as the winner of the 2025 Ronald F. Inglehart Best Book Award on Political Culture and Values.
In its assessment, the Jury praised the book as a major contribution to comparative cross-cultural research. The study offers a comprehensive comparative analysis of global abortion attitudes, demonstrating how national-level factors—including religion, social values, economic development, democracy, law, politics, gender inequality, and historical legacies—interact with individual characteristics to shape public opinion.
The Jury highlighted the book’s ambitious and innovative research design, which combines large-scale international survey data, media content analysis across more than forty countries, and qualitative interviews conducted in the United States and China. Through this mixed-methods, multilevel approach, Adamczyk develops a sophisticated framework for understanding how cultural and structural contexts shape attitudes toward one of the most contested moral and political issues of our time.
Particularly noteworthy, according to the Jury, is the book’s ability to bridge comparative politics, sociology, public opinion research, and the sociology of religion. Rather than treating abortion attitudes as simple expressions of personal belief, Adamczyk demonstrates how individual opinions are embedded within broader institutional, cultural, and historical environments. In doing so, she provides important insights into the formation of values and the ways in which social contexts influence moral and political attitudes.
The Jury further noted that the book speaks directly to themes that were central to Ronald Inglehart’s intellectual legacy. By examining the relationships among religion, modernization, cultural change, democracy, and public opinion across societies, Fetal Positions advances our understanding of the processes through which values are formed, transmitted, and transformed. The study represents the kind of theoretically informed, empirically rigorous, and globally comparative scholarship that has long been at the heart of the World Values Survey project.
In selecting the winner, the Jury emphasized not only the book’s methodological sophistication and scholarly contribution but also its accessibility and relevance. At a time when debates over reproductive rights, religion, gender, and democratic governance have become increasingly polarized around the world, Adamczyk provides a nuanced and evidence-based framework for understanding why societies continue to differ so profoundly in their attitudes and policies.
As part of the award ceremony on September 29, Professor Amy Adamczyk will deliver the 2025 Ronald F. Inglehart Best Book Award Lecture, offering the international research community an opportunity to engage directly with the findings and broader implications of her award-winning work. Researchers, students, and members of the public interested in political culture, values, religion, public opinion, gender, and comparative social research are warmly invited to attend.
Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/0mK4Tjl5TW-kxWM6N98XNQ
The World Values Survey Association extends its warmest congratulations to Professor Amy Adamczyk on receiving the 2025 Ronald F. Inglehart Best Book Award and thanks all nominated authors for their valuable contributions to scholarship on political culture, values, and social change.
By recognizing outstanding books in these fields, the Ronald F. Inglehart Best Book Award continues to promote the scientific ideals that guided Inglehart’s work throughout his distinguished career: rigorous empirical inquiry, comparative perspective, methodological innovation, and a commitment to understanding the cultural foundations of social and political development around the world.
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