The Happiness Researcher

5th September is the 80th birthday of the outstanding sociologist and political scientist Ronald Inglehart, Academic Supervisor of the HSE’s International Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR).

Ronald Inglehart

Professor Ingelhart is most well-known for the project World Values Survey (WVS) which he initiated. For more than thirty years, data collected by WVS has been used by sociologists, political scientists, economist, culturologists, government experts as a prime source of information about value systems in different societies and how they are connected to the socio-political development of states. Empirical research in the survey continues in nearly 100 countries on six continents. “As a social scientist I find this very exciting — to have rather coherent patterns in which economic development seems to bring roughly predictable changes in beliefs and values in nations”, says Ingelhart.

 

Ronald Ingelhart has been studying this problem since the end of the 1960s - not long after he started teaching at the University of Michigan where he is still a professor today. His ideas lay at the base of the WVS which has united researchers all around the world and they also helped to give shape to the Eurobarometer, monitoring public opinion in EU

Ingelhart’s books have been translated into all major languages. Among his most famous  are The Silent Revolution (1970), Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (1990), Modernization and Postmodernization (1997), Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (2005). For his contribution to the development of political science Ingelhart was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in 2011.

 Since 2010 Professor Ingelhart has been the Academic Supervisor of LCSR at the HSE. Over the period the laboratory have conducted 50 research projects. The results of some of those projects have gone into the preprint Understanding the Russian malaise: The collapse and recovery of subjective well-being in post-communist Russia. The results show, disquietingly, that Russians are less satisfied with life than they were 30 years ago.

'There are two paths to personal happiness,' claims Ingelhart. 'One is tied up with traditional religions, the other with achieving material well being. Did you know that the happiest people in the world are in Demark and Sweden - these are countries where secular values and the desire for self-fulfillment predominate. The fact that these countries are leaders indicate that even harsh winters can’t stop people feeling happy.'

Happy Birthday Professor Ingelhart!