Suchergebnisse

ObjectiveOne relatively neglected question raised by Amartya Sen's theory of human development is: Why do people and societies differ in their capacity to convert income and commodities into valuable human achievements ("functionings" in Sen's terminology)? I focus upon the degree to which people in developed and developing societies realize each of the six diverse types of valued functionings: long life, schooling, living in a society with less income inequality and less gender inequality, more political freedom, and greater life satisfaction.MethodsUsing data from all societies with a population of over 1 million (N= 156), I first regress each type of functioning on societies' GDP per capita to obtain the residual scores. These scores indicate which societies do better than expected, as expected, or worse than expected on the basis of their level of economic development.Results and ConclusionTo explain these differences, I then estimate an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model whose independent variables are economic growth rate, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, civil war fatalities, corruption, and several dummy variables for cultural regions of the world.

AbstractValues are conceptions of the desirable in various domains of life. This study tests the hypotheses that (1) when Muslims are a minority living in a non-Islamic society (e.g., India, Singapore, Uganda), their values are more similar to those of the non-Muslim majority religion in their society than to those of Muslims in Muslim-majority Islamic societies (e.g., Iran, Morocco, Pakistan); and (2) this tendency toward value assimilation is more pronounced when the Muslim minority is socially included, rather than excluded, by the non-Muslim majority. Data from representative samples of the population of nine Muslim-majority societies and nine Muslim-minority societies in the 2000 (fourth) wave of the World Values Surveys are used to construct scales for three domains of cultural values: religious values, family values, and gender values, and measures of social exclusion. The findings largely confirm hypothesis 1 and lend some support to hypothesis 2.