Does Latin America Exist? (And Is There a Confucian Culture?): A Global Analysis of Cross-Cultural Differences

Abstract

Inglehart and Carballo’s first task in this article is to introduce the two underlying dimensions that, they argue, explain a good deal of the variation in people’s attitudes toward a broad range of questions (see Figure 1) across a number of societies. These dimensions contrast: traditional conceptions of authority characteristic of some of the least technologically developed societies with secular-rational conceptions of authority prevalent among most European and East-Asian societies as well as concerns about physical and economic survival typical of industrializing or “modern” societies in Eastern Europe and East Asia and quality-of-life concerns (opportunities for participation in politics and the workplace, meaningful leisure and environmental protection) found more commonly among advanced-industrial or “postmodern” societies in northwestern Europe. The average or mean scores of citizens of 43 societies on the broad range of questions Inglehart and Carballo ask produce clusters of societies (in Figures 4–6) that roughly duplicate geographic relationships. Thus the authors show that Latin America (or any other geographic region from other clusters in Figure 4) exists in terms of attitudinal similarities in addition to being a set of geographically proximate societies.