More recent ventures in Human Development Theory have provided rich empirical support for the claim that processes of human emancipation are intimately tied with civicness and democratic performance of any given society (compare Inglehart & Welzel 2005, full citation in the attached paper).

For our class “Secondary Data Analysis” my colleagues Lisa Heindl, Anja Jungermann, Henrik Mädler and I set out on an ambitious project: to disconfirm the universality of the above claim. We hypothesized that the explanatory power (R2 in technical terms) of emancipation on civicness and democratic performance would decrease over higher levels of the former. In other words, once a certain catch-up effect is realized, more emancipation has no, or possibly even a reverse effect on civicness and democratic performance.

Visualization: Held, Heindl, Jungermann & Mädler (2006)

To test our hypothesis we ran sophisticated inferential statistics on data from the first four waves of the World Values Surveys (WVS) that we were kindly provided with by Prof. Dr. Chris Welzel, our teacher and member of the executive committee of the WVS association.

Much to our dismay, within and beyond the scope of this project we failed to provide empirical support for our hypothesis. In essence, we created eighteen pages of null findings. In spite of this “minor” drawback, this project was very insightful to me with regards to both Human Development Theory and secondary data analysis. What’s more, to be honest, I have not yet quite given up on questioning the merits of emancipation, as Inglehart and Welzel maintain them (2006).

I am grateful for the support by our instructor Prof. Dr. Petra Lietz and Prof. Dr. Chris Welzel. The cooperation with my colleagues (and friends) was inspiring yet efficient (even when our analyses were not). Many thanks for your stamina, Lisa, Anja & Henrik!

Please find below the complete essay available for download.