The World Values Survey (WVS) polls people from over a hundred countries on cultural values questions scored on two axes: secular vs traditional, and survival vs self-expression. The data is used to create the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map:

The 7th wave of polling began in 2017, concluded in 2022, and was published in 2023.

When Ron Inglehart began began organizing surveys in 1981, his theory was that as societies became more secure and prosperous, cultural values would tend to converge on individualism and secularism. Instead, The Economist reports that over the past 25 years "Countries that are already the most secular and individualistic are changing fastest and becoming even more secular; those that are most traditional and clannish are changing less and sometimes becoming more traditional, not less."

To illustrate the trend, The Economist presented the trajectory of English-speaking and Protestant European countries using the most recent WVS data:

The Economist quotes Christian Welzel: "People keep asking me if there is a limit, but I haven’t seen any sign yet."

The WVS will conduct Wave 8 surveys in the mid-2020s (currently planned 2023-2026). When the results are published, will they show that, on average, Protestant European and English-speaking countries score even higher on self-expression compared to Wave 7?

"Protestant European" and "English-speaking" countries are defined as the countries labelled as such in the 2023 Cultural Map that are included in Wave 8's post-2022 data (regardless of how Wave 8's Cultural Map labels them). For reference, these countries are: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United States.

"self-expression score" refers to the Wave 8 data corresponding to the self-expression vs survival axis. In Wave 8's data, this is labelled as "SurvSAgg."

"on average" means I will take the most recent score in Wave 8's data for each of these countries and take an average in excel. I will also do this for the most recent data for Wave 7's data, and if Wave 8's average is higher than Wave 7's, this question resolves YES.

The Wave 7 data that makes up the Cultural Map is available here. I have taken the data and averaged the self-expression values for the selected countries, which gave me a result of 2.299.

More questions about the next World Values Survey: