Post-Materialism Index
Also known as: Inglehart Index, Materialist-Postmaterialist Index, Four-Item Values Index
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.
Key highlights
- Parsimonious four-item version is easy to field and has been carried in cross-national surveys for decades.
- Captures a major cultural cleavage that helps explain the rise of environmental, participatory, and new-left politics.
- Cohort structure allows separation of lasting generational change from temporary period effects.
- Enables long-run comparative tracking of value change across dozens of societies.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use the Post-Materialism Index to study value change, the rise of new-politics issues (environment, gender, participation), and the cultural cleavage underlying support for green, libertarian, and new-left parties versus economically focused politics. It is appropriate for cross-national and cohort-level descriptive analysis of value priorities over time. Recognize that the forced-ranking format and sensitivity to inflation periods make it a measure of relative priorities under current conditions, best interpreted via cohort analysis.
Strengths & limitations
- Parsimonious four-item version is easy to field and has been carried in cross-national surveys for decades.
- Captures a major cultural cleavage that helps explain the rise of environmental, participatory, and new-left politics.
- Cohort structure allows separation of lasting generational change from temporary period effects.
- Enables long-run comparative tracking of value change across dozens of societies.
- The forced-ranking format measures relative, not absolute, priorities and is sensitive to short-term conditions like inflation.
- Period effects (e.g., recessions) can swamp the underlying generational trend if not modeled with cohort analysis.
- The materialist/mixed/postmaterialist trichotomy is coarse; the four-item version has limited measurement precision.
- Item content (fighting rising prices) ties the measure to economic context, complicating cross-era comparison.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What is the difference between the four-item and twelve-item versions?
The four-item version asks respondents to rank two materialist and two postmaterialist national goals and yields a materialist/mixed/postmaterialist trichotomy. The twelve-item version presents three sets of goals and counts postmaterialist choices to produce a more continuous 0-5 score with greater precision and reliability, at the cost of more survey space.
Why does the index dip during economic downturns?
The scarcity hypothesis holds that people prioritize whatever is in short supply. During recessions or inflation, economic and physical security become scarce, so respondents temporarily emphasize materialist goals like fighting rising prices. These are period effects layered on top of the slower generational trend, which is why cohort analysis is needed to recover the underlying value change.
Is post-materialism the same as left-wing ideology?
No. Post-materialism is a value orientation toward self-expression, participation, and quality of life rather than a left-right economic position. Postmaterialists often support new-left, green, and libertarian causes, but the dimension is partly orthogonal to the traditional economic left-right axis, which is why Inglehart treated it as a distinct cultural cleavage that reshaped party systems.
Sources
- 1.Inglehart, R. (1971). The silent revolution in Europe: Intergenerational change in post-industrial societies. American Political Science Review, 65(4), 991-1017.
- 2.Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.ISBN 9780691011806
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Post-Materialism Index. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/political-psychology/post-materialism-index