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	Post-Materialism Index	Political Ideology Scale
Field	Political Psychology	Political Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1971	1990
Originator	Ronald Inglehart	Hans-Dieter Klingemann & Norberto Bobbio
Type	Ranked-priorities value index	Self-report
Seminal source	Inglehart, R. (1971). The silent revolution in Europe: Intergenerational change in post-industrial societies. American Political Science Review, 65(4), 991-1017.	Fuchs, D., & Klingemann, H. D. (1990). The left-right schema. In M. Kent Jennings & Jan W. Van Deth (Eds.), Continuities in political action. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Aliases	Inglehart Index, Materialist-Postmaterialist Index, Four-Item Values Index	Left-Right Scale, Ideology Continuum, Political Spectrum Scale
Related	4	3
Summary	The Post-Materialism Index, developed by Ronald Inglehart (1971), classifies individuals as materialist, postmaterialist, or mixed based on the priority they assign to physical and economic security versus self-expression, belonging, and quality of life. It operationalizes Inglehart's silent-revolution thesis that prosperity and security in postwar democracies caused an intergenerational shift from materialist to postmaterialist value priorities.	The Political Ideology Scale measures individual self-placement on a left-right political spectrum, capturing fundamental preferences for government role, economic organization, and social values. The single-item self-placement measure (most common) asks respondents to rate themselves on a 0-10 or 0-100 continuum; multi-item versions assess distinct ideological dimensions (economic policy, social policy, nationalism). The left-right axis remains the dominant organizing principle of political competition globally, predicting party choice, policy preferences, and electoral behavior despite critiques that it oversimplifies multidimensional political space.