POLARIZED PRIORITIES OR FLEXIBLE ALTERNATIVES - DIMENSIONALITY IN INGLEHART MATERIALISM-POSTMATERIALISM SCALE

Ronald Inglehart's Postmaterialism thesis has undoubtedly been one of the most influential ideas in cross-national and cross-temporal resear ch on political behavior over the past two decades. The wide-ranging d ebate and criticism generated by the Inglehart thesis has focused both on theoretical issues concerning the nature of values and on methodol ogical issues concerning the measurement of Materialism and Postmateri alism, particularly the method for ranking individual responses. Using a data set that employed both the original ranking method for measuri ng values and an alternative rating method, we explore the dimensional structure of these values and discuss the implications of differences between the two measurement strategies. The two-dimensional solution provided by the rating method is, we argue, a more theoretically appro priate way of understanding Materialist and Postmaterialist values tha n the notion of a single conflict dimension, since it allows for a mor e flexible and realistic account of the choices made by most social ac tors-choices which may represent both Materialism and Postmaterialism.