Socialization Values, Cultural-Religious Zones and Modernization Theory

Socialization values play a crucial role in the reproduction of society’s value structure. In sociology, scant attention has been paid to the comparative analysis of socialization values. In this article, four socialization values are examined in a comparative and macrosociological context: independence, imagination, obedience, and religious faith, using data from the World Values Survey . Two Western European cultural-religious zones are examined, the Protestant and the Roman Catholic zones, each encompassing seven countries. This article has two aims. First, a more composite concept of the cultural–religious zone will be introduced than that used by Inglehart and collaborators. Second, for each of the four socialization values, the impact of cultural–religious zones and economic factors will be examined. The results reveal that ‘materialist’ economic factors have a significant association with all four socialization variables. ‘Idealist’ cultural-religious factors are significantly associated with independence and imagination, but not with religious faith and obedience.