The post-materialist economic freedom puzzle

Abstract

Countries with a higher proportion of people with post-materialist values are freer economically than those with a lower proportion. The reasons why this is puzzling are that post-materialist values are not obviously more supportive to economic freedom than materialist ones, and that post-materialism correlates negatively with market friendliness in the West and positively outside it. The paper argues that seeing market attitudes as opinions with which people express their materialist or post-materialist identity, an equilibrium in which post-materialists are market friendly and another in which they are market unfriendly are both possible. A change in the proportion of post-materialists, however, can easily trigger a shift from one equilibrium to the other. Regressions with data from the Integrated Values Survey confirm that post-materialists are more market unfriendly when their proportion in society is high enough, but this negative effect is mitigated by their political identity, the expressiveness of the individuals themselves, the ideology of the political parties in their country, and culture. The argument casts some doubt on the claim that post-materialism is a determinant of the institutions and policies of economic freedom.