MSc Dissertation: The Silent Revolution:
Post Materialist Values and Party Systems in European Democracies
My Masters dissertation concerns the quantitative testing of Ronald Inglehart's 'Silent Revolution'. This comprises a large scale analysis of post materialist values and new parties across Europe. Several large scale data sets are utilised including the BHPS, WVS, EVS and GGSS and the methods are exclusively statistical.
The dissertation revived a first and allowed me to graduate from my Masters with a distinction.
Below is the abstract of the dissertation and a link to download it in full.
Abstract:
This dissertation comprises a longitudinal, cross-national analysis of how changing social values, particularly post materialism, influence political party systems. The hypothesis is that increasingly post materialist values will cause an increase in the prominence of both new left and new right wing parties. The dissertation seeks to test this hypothesis through a multi-stage statistical analysis across several secondary data sets. The first stage is a broad analysis of 8 European nations at the macro-level. This analysis proves largely fruitless. A brief pooled analysis across 101 countries follows the macro-level study and acts as a conduit to the micro-level case studies. The micro UK case analysis then uses BHPS data to perform a full investigation using bivariate, regression and some more niche methods. Methodologically the UK case study is successful but its findings are somewhat more limited, with generally low associations and lack of significance. The final study, the German micro study based on GGSS data, has a different issue. The bivariate associations are impressive with one result showing a very strong association between post materialist values and voting for new parties. However, the German data is not conducive to successful regression analysis as some measures are not recorded consistently across time which makes model building difficult. In conclusion, this dissertation uncovers findings which suggest a link between post materialism and new parties, but not enough evidence is presented to fully conclude on the nature and strength of the relationship.
Link to do files: MSc Dissertation do files
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