Ronald F. Inglehart was a distinguished political scientist and professor at the University of Michigan where he held the Amy and Alan Loewenstein Professorship in Democracy, Democratization and Human Rights. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1934 and raised in Glencoe, Illinois, he earned his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University before completing his Master's and PhD at the University of Chicago. After serving as a Fulbright Scholar at Leiden University in the Netherlands, he joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1966, establishing himself as a central figure in the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. Throughout his five-decade career at Michigan, Inglehart also founded the Ronald F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the Higher School of Economics in Russia, demonstrating his commitment to international scholarly collaboration.
Inglehart pioneered the theory of generational value change, introducing the influential concept of postmaterialism which explained how economic development leads societies to shift from materialist to postmaterialist values. He founded the World Values Survey, a groundbreaking global research project spanning over 100 societies that has become one of the most widely used social scientific datasets, enabling the creation of the renowned Inglehart-Welzel cultural map of the world. His development of the cultural dimensions model with two axes traditional versus secular-rational values and survival versus self-expression values revolutionized the study of cross-cultural political attitudes and provided a framework for understanding global value changes. With over 94,000 citations as of 2019, Inglehart's research demonstrated how economic development reshapes human motivations with profound implications for democracy, gender roles, religious practice, and social norms worldwide.
As one of the most cited political scientists in history, Inglehart's work transcended academic boundaries to influence policy debates and international organizations seeking to understand global cultural dynamics. He received numerous prestigious honors including the Johan Skytte Prize, often regarded as the Nobel Prize of political science, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his transformative contributions to the field. Inglehart mentored generations of scholars through his teaching at the University of Michigan and his leadership of international research collaborations, establishing methodological standards that continue to shape comparative political research. His intellectual legacy endures through the ongoing World Values Survey project and through the countless researchers who apply his frameworks to understand the evolving relationship between cultural values and political systems across the globe.
