When Does Modernization Produce Post-Materialist Values? The Conditional Role of Income Across Generations in Bangladesh

Author

S.M. Shahidul

Abstract

 This study investigates the relationship between economic security, generational cohorts as well as post-materialist values in Bangladesh using data from the World Values Survey. Drawing on modernization theory, the study clarifies whether economic resources and generational replacement contribute to the emergence of post-material values in a developing nation context. The analysis performs descriptive statistics, bivariate chi-square tests as well as multivariate logistic regression models incorporating interaction effects between income and generational cohorts. The results exhibit that income has a positive and statistically significant effect on post-materialist values, suggesting that economic security remains an important role to value alteration. However, generational cohort does not show a significant independent effect and younger respondents do not exhibit higher levels of post-materialist value. Interaction analysis reveals that the impact of income varies across cohorts: it is stronger among the middle cohort but weaker among the young cohort. These results indicate that value change in Bangladesh is not linear but stratified and conditional upon the distribution of economic security and shaped by structural inequalities. The study contributes to the literature by highlighting how unequal economic security shapes generational value differences in developing societies. 

Keywords

Post-materialist values, Modernization, Generational cohort, Income inequality, Conditional modernization

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