Beyond Convergence and Divergence: A Belief Network Analysis of Global Cultural Change

Although globalization has intensified cross-border interactions, cultural belief systems do not appear to be converging in their internal organization. Existing research on cultural change has largely focused on differences in the content of attitudes, often relying on predefined value dimensions. This paper instead examines how beliefs are organized within societies. Using data from the World Values Survey (1981–2022), we construct belief networks for participating countries at each wave to identify which beliefs function as central organizing hubs within national belief systems and which networks are similar to one another in terms of their hubs. Adopting a bottom-up, relational approach, the belief network construction allows culturally salient belief structures to emerge directly from patterns of co-occurrence among survey responses rather than from theoretically imposed categories. We identify "bridge" beliefs that connect otherwise separate clusters of attitudes within a society's belief system. Networks are then compared using a clustering method that evaluates similarity based on the percentage of shared bridge beliefs. By tracing the evolution of belief structures and themes across societies and waves, this study provides a new lens for understanding cultural change and reengages the modernization debate from the angle of belief organization rather than value content. Three main findings summarize this work. First, across all seven waves and most countries, religion-related beliefs function as the most durable structural hubs across nations. Within-country disagreements over religion consistently predict disagreement across a wider range of other beliefs than politics and other value domains. Second, at particular historical moments, however, other issues rise to comparable centrality before receding: attitudes toward homosexuality become structural hubs in the late 1990s, and digital information access does so in the mid-2000s, with these shifts occurring at different times across countries. These temporal shifts are consistent with post-materialist accounts of cultural change, which link emerging value salience to societal development and shifting material conditions. Third, societies exhibit a recurring pattern in which contested issues temporarily reorganize belief systems, and belief system architectures cluster in ways that often cut across geographic regions, suggesting that institutional and cultural contexts shape how values are organized more strongly than spatial proximity, consistent with multiple modernities theory.