The World Value Survey (WVS) has recently completed its seventh wave of data collection, covering 58 countries over the period of 2017-2022. This series of posts will highlight some of the findings, using the same subset of countries. In the last post, I focused on the link between trust of outsiders and what the WVS calls “emancipative” values, as in emancipation from authority. Emancipative values emphasize freedom of choice and "involve priorities for lifestyle liberty, gender equality, personal autonomy and the voice of the people." (World Values Survey).
This post will explore how much freedom of choice and control WVS participants feel, as interpreted from their responses to the following question:
“Some people feel they have completely free choice and control over their lives, while other people feel that what they do has no real effect on what happens to them. Please use this scale where 1 means “none” at all and 10 means “a great deal” to indicate how much freedom of choice and control you have over the way your life turns out.”
The columns in the following chart represent the percent of respondents in each country who endorsed options 8 through 10 in response to the above question, which I interpreted as meaning they felt “considerable” freedom of choice and control.
Hmmm. I would have thought there’d be a closer relationship between type of government (e.g., democratic versus autocratic) and perceived freedom of choice and control. True, a greater percentage of US and Canadian respondents reported high levels of freedom, but more than 40% of respondents in China, Iran, and Myanmar reported high levels of freedom as well. And not even a quarter of the Japanese respondents felt substantially free. Obviously, perceived freedom of choice and control has other feeder streams than form of government. I would guess that cultural factors, such as social and family pressures, exert their own constraints on individual choice and control, independent of how nice or nasty the system of government.
Another possible reason there’s no clear pattern to this survey result is that respondents from different countries interpreted the question differently. For example, some respondents may view freedom as having the room to maneuver within constraints and others may view freedom and constraints as opposites, in a zero-sum relationship.