The post-materialist economic freedom puzzle

Countries with a higher proportion of people with post-materialist values are freer economically than those with a lower proportion. The reason why this is puzzling is that post-materialist values are not obviously more supportive to economic freedom than materialist ones, and that post-materialism correlates negatively with market friendliness in the West and positively outside it. The paper argues that seeing market attitudes as opinions with which people express their materialist or post-materialist identity, an equilibrium in which post-materialists are market friendly and another one in which they are market unfriendly are both possible. A change in the proportion of post-materialists, however, can easily trigger a shift from one equilibrium to the other. Regressions with data from the Integrated Values Survey confirm that post-materialists are more market unfriendly when their proportion in society is high enough, but this negative effect is mitigated by their political identity, the expressiveness of the individuals themselves, and the ideology of the political parties in their country.


Introduction
In the long run economic development is accompanied by cultural changea change in the beliefs and values people hold.Quantitative, qualitative historical studies (Congleton 2022;McCloskey 2017;Cheang and Palmer 2023, pp. 117-152) have confirmed that this accompaniment is not just a happenstance but a causal relationship, possibly in both directions.
As a part of the research uncovering how and why values matter for economic outcomes, government ideology, too, has been shown to matter for economic freedom (Castro and Martins 2021;Murphy 2019;Jäger 2017), for other measures of economic policy and different other outcomes such as economic growth (Potrafke 2017), and even for sustainable development (Aidt et al. 2018).
One recent line of research is concerned with those values and beliefs that are referred to as post-materialism (Inglehart, 1997) and have been shown to have emerged in the last four decades or so, especially in Western democracies.As a part of the bigger question of how postmaterialism influences economic freedom (Jordaan 2023), this paper is concerned with the question of how post-materialism is related to attitudes towards markets.The puzzle is that although a higher value of post-materialism at the country level was found to lead to higher economic freedom, economic freedom seems to be neither materialist nor post-materialist, or it is both: the 'economic' part in it is materialist, while the 'freedom' part is post-materialist.
Why is post-materialism associated with market friendliness in some countries and with market unfriendliness in others?And in fact, is that the case?The paper first shows that it is (Subsection 3.1), then sets up a hypothesis based on an understanding of expressive behaviour (Subsection 3.2), which is tested in Section 4 with individual data from the Integrated Values Survey.Section 5 concludes.

Literature review: the puzzle of post-materialist economic freedom
The way people think about the market economy has long been associated with a broader view about society.Hayek (2018) found the intellectual roots of a 'planning mentality' in different kinds of individualisms and different intellectual traditions of the enlightenment and the misunderstanding of the methods of science.Similarly, Sowell (2007) identifies a constrained and an unconstrained 'vision' that shape thinking about society, including the market.Lawson et al.'s (2020) extensive review of the literature on the determinants of economic freedom, however, remains agnostic aboutalthough it mentions -culture and 'ideological forces' as possible determinants.
A few recent contributions to the literature on economic freedom examine post-materialism as a possible cause or effect.Post-materialism is the opposite of materialism, which Teague et al. (2020, p. 2, footnote 4) define as 'desires to acquire material possessions for oneself above most other things'.'Postmaterialists', on the other hand 'do not place a negative value on economic and physical securitythey value it positively, like everyone else; but unlike Materialists, they give even higher priority to self-expression and the quality of life' (Inglehart 1997, p. 35).
The most commonly used measure of post-materialism comes from Inglehart (1997, pp. 108-130) and also from Welzel and Inglehart (2005).The so-called 4-item measure, which is included in the World Values Survey and European Values Study files which are available for the widest sample of countries, asks the respondent to choose two items from a list of four as national priorities: two of them, 'maintaining order' and 'fighting rising prices', are materialist, while the other two, 'protecting freedom of speech' and 'giving people more say in important government decisions', are post-materialist.The measure is calculated with regards to whether the first or the second choice is (post-) materialist, or both are so (WVS, 2017a, p. 197;WVS2017b, pp. 11-12).More broadly understood, post-materialism is not just a package of some (post-modern) values, but the lack of others, including religion and the work ethic (Kafka & Kostis 2021).
Ideas about economic policies are in mutual relationships with economic development (Caplan 2003, Davis andKnauss 2013), and so is post-materialism.Inglehart (1997) argues that a rise in GDP per capita is one of the main reasons for the rise of post-materialism as people turn to higher ideals once their material needs are satisfied and their lives are secure.After this, it is not surprising that post-materialism has also been found to reduce economic growth.Kafka and Kostis (2021) finds a negative effect among OECD countries for the period 1981-2021, although they do not control for economic freedom, but for regulatory quality.Jordaan and Dima (2020) and Jordaan (2023) separate direct and indirect effects of post-materialism on economic growth and find the direct effect, which is measured after controlling for institutional quality, to be negative.
The relationship between economic freedom and post-materialism seems much less straightforward a priori.Preferring 'order' and 'fighting high prices', which the measure of post-materialism mentioned above includes as possible national priorities, are neither pro-nor anti-market.'Order' is a traditional and religious pro-market idea in the European history of economic thought (Krarup 2019).Yet Roepke (1958, p. 233), one of the main protagonists of this 'Ordnung' tradition, sounds quite post-materialist when writing that he 'would stand for a free economic order even if it implied material sacrifice'.Also, 'fighting rising prices' might mean price regulationquite an anti-market policy -, as well as conservative central banking quite a pro-market one.
How to view the relationship between markets and moral progress has also not been obvious in the past, as Hirschman's (1982) 'tableau idéologique' makes clear.Markets were seen as forces of moral improvement as well as those of decline.They were also seen as constrained by traditions as well as supported by traditions.
Kafka & Kostis's (2021) measure of post-materialism explicitly includes competition affinity and work ethic with a negative weight, two values that may be seen as parts of a promarket attitude1 .Surprisingly, religion, too, is considered a materialist value, and not only by Kafka and Kostis (2021, p. 908); Inglehart (2021) looks at the 'sudden decline' of religion as part of a shift from materialist to post-materialist values.Religion, on the other hand is associated with a market friendly attitude (Guiso et al. 2003), too.
Roughly at the same time as post-material values emerged, market friendliness declined (Czeglédi, Lips and Newland, 2021, pp. 679-681).The younger generationprobably the more post-materialistare less market friendly than their elders (ibid., pp.670-674), more concerned with egalitarian aspects of democracy, and less so with the liberal aspect of it (Facchini and Melki 2021).
The connection between post-materialism and economic freedom has been found to be mutually positive, however.More generally, a higher level of post-materialism is associated with institutions, which then leads to higher economic growth.Jordaan and Dima (2020) finds a causality that runs from post-materialism to GDP per capita through institutional quality measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators (Kaufmann et al., 2010), while for Jordaan (2023) such an effect works through economic freedom.In both papers this indirect effect is positive: even after controlling for different possible determinants, a less materialist (a more post-materialist) country has institutions that are not only of higher quality but economically freer.As for political institutions, Welzel & Inglehart (2005) show that post-materialist values, more precisely that subset of theirs which the authors call liberty aspirations, are good predictors of the democratisation of the 1990's.But a positive relationship runs the other way around, too.A post-materialist attitude, Teague et al. (2020) find, is more widespread in countries that are richer or economically freer.
For either direction of the causality between economic freedom and post-materialism, it seems interesting to ask how post-materialism influences attitudes to markets.Answering the question can help us understand better how post-materialism affects institutions and policies.
When it comes to the reverse causality, uncovering the relationship between post-materialism and market attitudes can inform us if the process in which economic freedom makes people more post-materialist is a turning towards, or a turning away from, markets.

Does post-materialism predict market friendliness?
An examination of the relationship between post-materialism and market friendliness suggests a puzzle which the literature reviewed above does not explain.

The puzzle of post-materialist economic freedom
One of the results I reviewed above is that more post-materialist countries are economically freer, which may be because more post-materialist people are more market friendly.The puzzle, as shown by Figure 1, is that they are not.Figure 1 classifies countries into two groups: those of the West 2 and those outside the West.This classification is suggested by the fact that postmaterialism is most widespread in Western, affluent countries.To classify people as materialist, mixed, or post-materialist, Figure 1 uses the 4-item post-materialist question (Y002) of the Integrated Values Surveys (EVS, 2022;Haerpfer et al., 2022).The two dimensions of market 2 The West does not include the same countries in each wave because not every country appears in each wave.Considering all the waves, the West includes Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Great Britain, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.
friendliness are the attitudes3 to private ownership (E036) and to individual responsibility (E037) standardized by country, and rescaled so that a higher number means stronger support for either private ownership or for individual responsibility.On Figure 1, which shows all six waves of the Integrated Values Surveys for which the data in question are available, the West and the countries outside the West are in a sharp contrast.Outside the western countries more post-materialist people seem indeed to be more market friendly on both dimensions.In the West, however, it is rather the people with post-materialist values who are less market friendly.
The idea of a non-monotonous relationship of post-materialism with market friendliness is not new.Inglehart (1997, pp. 260-265) analysed the relationship between the support for private property and post-materialism and found a slightly inverted V-shaped relationship between the two for a group of 28 non-post-socialist countries.

A hypothesis
My hypothesis to explain the non-monotonous relationship is based on the expressive theory of political behaviour (Brennan and Lomasky 1993;Hillman 2010;Holcombe 2023).Talking in a market friendly way is expressive behaviour, and, as we saw in the literature review, market friendliness is neither obviously materialist nor post-materialist.I assume that market (un)friendliness may be an expressive preference, whereas (post-)materialism is part of people's identity.Expressive people, therefore, talk in a market friendly or a market unfriendly way, which is inferred by others to be materialist or post-materialist.
That is to say, I assume an attempt at consistency.By consistency I mean that if a person expresses a post-materialist mind-set on one scale (p), he or she wants to express the same mind-set on the market-friendliness (f) scale.That is, if a person is said to be post-materialist because of her answers on the post-materialism scale, she wants to be inferred to be postmaterialist by the other scale as well.Not everybody is supposed to talk about markets in an expressive way.As Sowell (1996Sowell ( /1980, p. 352, p. 352) says, 'Virtually everyone has political opinions, but not everyone has a political vision'.
Using the language of expressive voting (Holcombe 2023, pp. 96-116) some people, let us call them ideologues or believers, have 'anchor preferences' while the others have 'derivative preferences', which are derived from the anchors by accepting an identityand the opinions that go with it.
Suppose that the distribution of beliefs can be described by the probability distribution where p means post-materialist, m means materialist, f means market friendly, u means market unfriendly, and a person may be of a believer (b) or an expressive (e) type.Pr  (, ) denotes the probability that a type k individual of identity i talks in manner j.For believers the probabilities    are given, as they are determined by their visions, while for expressive voters it is only whether they are post-materialist or materialist that is given, and with this knowledge they then decide how to talk about markets.
The expected utility of an expressive person of identity i of talking in manner j is where v i (j) is the utility of a post-materialist (i=p) or materialist (i=m) person of being considered a post-materialist or a materialist by others, and Pr(i|j) is the conditional probability of a person being identified as i by talking j.Everybody is supposed to prefer to be inferred to be their own type: which is equivalent with assuming consistency.
Considering that the increase in utility for a type i person as a result of talking in a market friendly instead of a market unfriendly way is Because of (3) inequality ( 5) predicts that there are two equilibria.There is an equilibrium, henceforth a P/F equilibrium, in which the post-materialist expressive person talks in a market friendly way while the materialist person talks in a market unfriendly way, that is π pu e = 0 and There is another equilibrium, let us call it the M/F equilibrium, in which the opposite holds: the post-materialists choose to talk in a market unfriendly way and the materialists choose to talk in a market friendly way.In this equilibrium π pf e = 0 and π mu e = 0, and it is possible if Which equilibrium is more probable depends, then, on the distribution of the ideologues.
Propositions 1 and 2, which can be found in the Appendix, detail the condition under which a P/F or a M/F equilibrium may arise.The main conclusion is that a P/F equilibrium is somewhat more probable if and a M/F equilibrium is more probable if The intuition is that since each type wants to express her identity through market friendly or unfriendly talk, they choose the option which makes the others infer them to be their type with the highest probability.If post-materialists are market friendly, then the effective signal of postmaterialism is to talk in a market friendly way.If it is the materialists that tend to talk in a market friendly way, however, the effective signal for a post-materialist person is to talk in a market unfriendly way.
Assuming that the post-materialist vision has an anti-market bias4 , its rise can explain why the equilibrium changes from a P/F one, which we saw in section 4.1 is the case outside the Western countries, to a M/F, which we saw is the case in the West.Seeing the two equilibria of the model as informational cascades (Bikhchandani et al., 1992), we have an explanation for how this change may happen.In the framework above there are no signals independently observed; the only signal that is observed is the decision of those ahead of the person who is about to make his or her own decision about how to talk about markets.A change in the vision of the ideologues might be a signal to an expressive individual to change his or her talk about the market, whose behaviour will be observed by another expressive individual and taken as a signal, and so on.
That is, the change is induced by a change in the distribution of believers from the one described in condition ( 8) to the other one described in condition (9).Under condition ( 9) for example, the first expressive individual will choose to talk in a market friendly way if postmaterialist, and a market unfriendly way if materialist, which makes it even easier for the second expressive individual to make the same decision.
The rise of post-materialism with any anti-market bias will not necessarily lead to a decrease in average market friendliness, because a shift from a P/F to an M/F equilibrium may increase the proportion of market friendly people by making the expressive materialists talk in a market friendly way.To see this, suppose that pf is the proportion of post-materialists within the market friendly believers (π f b ) and pu is the same for market unfriendly believers (π u b ).That is, which by condition ( 8) and ( 9) implies that a P/F equilibrium is more probable if p f > p u , and a M/F equilibrium is more probable otherwise.That is, the proportion of those talking in a market friendly way, F(pe), is in a non-monotonous relationship with pe, the proportion of postmaterialists within the expressive voters (π e ): where p  π  ≡ π pf e + π pu e .
This means, first, that the increase in pe will increase average market friendliness provided that the market friendly ideologues are more post-materialist than the market unfriendly ones.As the ideologues become more market unfriendly and more post-materialist at the same time, an M/F equilibrium becomes more probable and the relation of post-materialism and market friendliness becomes negative.
Second, a shift from the P/F equilibrium to the M/F one will not necessarily decrease the average market friendliness.A shift from a P/F to an M/F equilibrium might even increase it, if the market unfriendly ideologues are to a great extent ahead of the expressive ones in terms of post-materialism.For example, suppose that in the initial P/F equilibrium which changes to a new M/F one, in which Then, average market friendliness in the first equilibrium will exceed that in the second, since according to ( 11)

Some empirics of post-materialism and market friendliness
The prediction of the framework above is that as the proportion of post-materialists increases, the post-materialists tend to be less market friendly, and the materialists more so.To see if this prediction can be given any empirical support, I will run regressions on individual and crosscountry data in subsection 4.1.Subsection 4.2 is an attempt to see if the reasons for the predictions that were given above may also be confirmed.

Market friendliness and the proportion of post-materialists
I will use data form the Integrated Values Survey (EVS, 2022;Haerpfer et al., 2022) to check whether the proportion of post-materialists in a country matters for whether a post-materialist person is more or less market-friendly than is a materialist.The results are in Tables 1 and 2.
The dependent variables in these regressions are the same as those I used in section 3.1: the question on private versus government ownership (E036) and the question on individual versus government responsibilities (E037).The answers to both questions are normalized by country and rescaled in such a way that a higher number shows a stronger support for private ownership or individual responsibility.The main independent variables are either materialism or post-materialism as identified by the 4-item post-materialism variable (Y002).Since the variable does not differentiate between materialists and post-materialists only, but introduces a mixed category, and it is not clear if 'mixed' people should be seen rather as materialists or post-materialists, I will run the regressions with materialism first, and then with post-materialism, as dependent variables.
Dummies for gender, 40 years old or younger, three education levels, ten income brackets, unemployed, and self-employed are also included among the explanatory variables as control variables, as are dummies for different IVS waves, for countries, and for election years 5 .A year 5 Their estimated coefficients are not shown in the tables but available upon request.
is defined as an election year if there was either a legislative or an executive election in that year as indicated by the variables LEGELEC and EXELEC in the Database of Political Institutions (DPI) by Cruz et al. (2021a).Since the DPI covers years up to 2020 only, for the years 2021 and 2022 I used the Election Guide website of the International Foundations for Electoral Systems (IFES 2023).The reason for including this variable is that the political campaign that is going on in an election year might provide a reason to be more emphatic about our opinion.
The first two columns of Tables 1 and 2 show that both materialism and post-materialism have a negative, although small, effect on market friendliness.This small negative sign, however, hides a non-monotonous relationship, as indicated in columns 3-4 in both tables.The coefficient I am concerned with here is that of the cross-variable of materialism or postmaterialism at the individual level and the proportion of materialists, post-materialists or mixed at the country level.The pattern is the same in both tables: at a low level of post-materialistswhen the proportion of materialists is high and the proportions of post-materialists and mixed are lowmaterialism has a negative effect on market friendliness at the individual level.At a higher level of mixed and post-materialists, however, the effect of materialism becomes positive.
The coefficients in column 3 of Table 1, for instance, allows us to conclude that the effect of being a materialist on the preference of private ownerships is a negative 19.9 percent of a standard deviation.The effect becomes zero, however, when, for example, the proportion of materialists is reduced to 25 percent in such a way that 45 percent are mixed and 30 percent are post-materialists.If nobody is materialist, however, then the effect will be between a positive 3.9 percent and a 10.7 percent of a standard deviation.Similarly, the coefficients in column 4 of Table 1 indicate that with no post-materialists or mixed ones in the population, postmaterialist people are predicted to be 69 percent of a standard deviation more market friendly, and they are predicted to be (0.69-1.01=) 32 percent of a standard deviation less market friendly when the proportion of mixed individuals is at its maximum.When the proportion of postmaterialists increases at the expense of the proportion of mixed, however, the negative effect of post-materialism decreases, as shown by the middle panel of the tables.The middle panels in both Table 1 and 2 show whether a change between 'mixed' and postmaterialists changes the effect of the materialist or post-materialist dummy.The answer is that it usually increases the effect (reduces the negative effect of) post-materialism, and this conclusion is much more uncertain for the case of materialism.The effect is always positive and statistically significant at the usual significance levels when post-materialism is the explanatory dummy (as can be seen in the last columns of Tables 1 and 2), but only so in one case (Table 2) when materialism is the explanatory variable.This qualification of the results, however, never changes the result that if the proportion of materialists decreases then the effect of post-materialism on market friendliness decreases, too.
The control variables are usually significant.Females and the young are found to have less market friendly values, while people in higher income brackets and with more education are more supportive of markets, and so are those who are self-employed.The unemployed are significantly less supportive.The dummy for election years has a statistically significant effect only in the case of government responsibility, suggesting that this variable is the one that is shaped by expressive behaviour more.In addition, the effect is positive and roughly as big (0.019) as what undoes the (small) negative unconditional effect of post-materialism (-0.025) in column 2 of Table 2.
The main prediction, however, that the effect of post-materialism on market friendliness is positive at a low level of post-materialism and becomes negative at its higher levels can be given support with the IVS data.This is especially true if the category 'mixed' is considered rather post-materialist.

Political identity, expressiveness, and anchor preferences
What follows is a test to see if the explanation if the results I came to in subsection 4.1 has anything to do with the hypothesis of subsection 3.2.First, the mechanism at work is supposed to be an expressing of identity as opposed to other identities.The effect of an increase in the proportion of post-materialists should therefore be stronger among people with some identity and weaker among people with other identities.Second, the mechanism is supposed to work through expressive behaviour.For those with weaker intentions to be expressive these effects should be mitigated.Third, the change in relations between market friendliness and materialism is supposed to be driven by the distribution of 'ideologues'.The political preferences of the elite, therefore, should also shape the effects identified empirically in section 4.1.
To see if these effects are at work, I will test four different variables for their cross-effect with the interaction between post-materialism at the individual level and the proportion of postmaterialists within the country sample.In Tables 3 and 4 this additional variable is called Z, the actual meaning of which is shown at the top of each column.
Column 1 in Tables 3 and 4 checks for the possibility that the effect of the proportion of post-materialists on the relationship between post-materialism and market friendliness depends further on political self-identity.The variable 'leftist' is created from the IVS variable E033, which asks the respondents to position themselves on a 10-unit political scale running from left to right.To calculate the variable leftist the scale is reversed and the variable is normalized by country.The variable, as a result, runs roughly between -3.5 and 5.6 with a higher number meaning a political position further on the left.The results in column 1 of Tables 3 and 4 show that the change to a negative effect of post-materialism as the proportion of post-materialists increases is more pronounced among those with a more leftist self-identity.Among those with a right-wing identity an increase in the proportion of post-materialists may even make the effect of post-materialism positive.The change in the proportion of those with mixed values is not affected by the inclusion of political identity.
Column 2 in Tables 3 and 4 represents an attempt to account for people's willingness to be more or less expressive about their political opinions.The assumption is that a greater willingness to express political opinions is accompanied by more talking about politics, therefore those who talk more about politics are more expressive about their political identity.
The variable (A062) I use here is the one that allows the respondents to choose between three answers to the question of how often they discuss 'political matters' with friends: frequently, occasionally, and never.As the first two answers seem to be dependent on culture, I normalize this variable, too, by country, and reverse the scale for a higher value to mean a more frequent discussion of politics.This results in a variable that runs between -2.6 and 2.7.
The results in Tables 3 and 4 confirm the expectations, if not perfectly.On the one hand the cross variable in question has a significantly negative coefficient in both Tables.Postmaterialists and talkative people become more unfriendly to markets as the proportion of postmaterialists around them grows than do post-materialists and non-talkative people.This means that among those who discuss 'political matters' more often with friends, an increase in the proportion of post-materialists makes post-materialist values more negatively associated with market friendliness.In the interpretation of this paper, this is because they behave in a way that is more similar to the expressive behaviour the model assumes.On the other hand, the interaction of the variable discuss with the product of mixed and post-materialism has a slightly positive coefficient in Table 4, the interpretation of which fact is not clear.pm: post-materialism dummy.Z is an independent variable as indicated at the top of each column.discuss: how often discuss political matters with friends; leftist: political self-positioning with a higher number meaning farther on the left; polarization: highest ideological distance between parties; left-right share: voting share of political parties with a clearly left or right identity.Controls (not shown): dummies for election years, gender, 40 years old or younger, three education levels, ten income brackets, unemployed, self-employed, IVS waves, countries.*** : p<0.01, ** : p<0.05.
Columns 3 and 4 in Tables 3 and 4 are two attempts to quantify the idea that those with a vision -the 'ideologues' with anchor preferenceshave a role in shaping those without one.If political parties represent clear differences concerning economic policies, then expressive people will not choose their preferred economic policies to express their identity determined by their level of post-materialism.Rather, they will choose the economic policy of the party they identify with.In terms of the model in subsection 3.2, if there are more 'ideologues' or they are more evenly distributed then there is less room for market friendliness to be chosen expressively.This idea is captured in two ways in columns 3 and 4 of Tables 3 and 4. Both variables are borrowed or calculated from the Database of Political Institutions (Cruz et al. 2021a).In column 3 I use the strict version of the variable polarization.Polarization is defined as 'the maximum difference between the chief executive's party's value …and the values of the three largest government parties and the largest opposition party.' (Cruz et al. 2021b, p. 20).Since values can be right (1), centre (2), or left (3), the difference can be two at the maximum.Left and right on the other hand is defined with a focus on economic policy (ibid., p. 6).The 'strict' version means that legislative and executive elections are required to be competitive enough6 for the variable to be different form zero.
The expectation is that the effects in question will be mitigated by polarization because with greater polarization, market-friendliness will not be chosen to indicate a deeper preference but will be chosen by the parties people associate with.This proposition is partially confirmed in column 3 in Tables 3 and 4. In countries with higher polarization an increase in the share of post-materialists will not make people with post-materialist values be as unfriendly to markets as those living in a country with less political polarization.Even the highest level of polarization (2), however, will not make a rise in the proportion of post-materialists increase the market friendliness level of post-materialists 7 .The increase in the proportion of those with mixed values, however, will increase the effect of post-materialism on market-unfriendliness more under higher polarization.
Another measure of political ideology is what I call left-right share in column 4 of Tables 3   and 4. The left-right share is the total voting share of those parties in the legislationthe three largest government parties and the largest party of the oppositionthat are identified as right or left.Similarly to the case of polarization, for the left-right share to be different from zero, legislative elections should be competitive enough 8 .The results are similar to those with polarization.The higher the voting share of right or left parties, the lesser the extent to which an increase in the proportion of post-materialists will make the post-materialist person more unfriendly to markets.At a total voting share of 1 (meaning 100 percent) of those parties that are clearly right or left, this effect is almost zero, both in the case of private ownership and private responsibility attitudes.A change in the proportion of those with mixed values has, however, the opposite effect again.
7 According to the numbers in column 3 of Table 4, for example, a 10 percentage-point increase in the proportion of post-materialists (with no change in the proportion of those with mixed values) will decrease the effect of postmaterialism on the attitude towards individual responsibility by (0.1×0.716=) 7.16 percent of a standard deviation.At the maximum level of polarization this decreasing effect is reduced by (0.1×2×0.223=) 4.46 percentage points. 8The variable LIEC should have a value of at least 6.
In sum, post-materialist people become less market friendly as compared to materialists as the proportion of post-materialists increase, but this effect is stronger among people who (1) have a left-wing identity, (2) talk more about politics with friends, (3) live a country with less ideological polarization between parties, or (4) live in a country with a lower voting share of those parties that are clearly left-or right-wing.

Conclusion
As values and beliefs are one of the factors shaping institutions and economic performance, it is reasonable to ask how post-materialism, as a system of values and beliefs that have been emerging in the most developed countries and will probably do so elsewhere in the future, will shape economic freedom.As a part of the answer to that question, this paper has asked how post-materialism shapes the attitudes towards economic freedom, particularly those towards private ownership and private responsibility.
It turns out that the effect of post-materialism on such attitudes becomes negative after a certain proportion of those with post-materialist values within the population is reached.This would predict a further decline in the attitudes towards markets and would give reasons to worry about the future of economic freedom.There are three reasons that should counter such worries.
First, the logic of expressive behaviour in section 3 and the regression results in section 4 are concerned with the relative position of the individual on the market-friendliness scale: to signal one's identity, it is enough to be different.Accordingly, in the regressions the scale was normalized by country.So, the average support for market friendliness can be higher in a more post-materialist country, even if in such countries post-materialists are less market friendly than materialists.
Second, the explicit and direct ideological support for market institutions might not be the only reason to politically support and maintain those institutions.One might realize, for example, that having a market economy is still the best way to have a free society in general.
Third, if market attitudes are indeed expressive, then they are not deep, and they can be changed by persuasion from those who have a vision.Proof:

Appendix
A P/F equilibrium will be able to emerge if Pr(p|f) > Pr(p|u) implies π pu e = 0 and π mf e = 0, and vice versa.
As Pr(p|f) = Proof: An M/F equilibrium will be able to emerge if Pr(m|f) > Pr(m|u) implies π mu e = 0 and π pf e = 0, and vice versa.

Table 1
Post-materialism and private attitudes to private ownership m/pm is either a post-materialism dummy or a materialism dummy as indicated in the top of the columns and is based on the 4-item measure (Y002) in the IVS.post-materialism=1 if Y002 is 'post-materialist', zero otherwise, and materialism=1 if Y002 is 'materialist', zero otherwise.Controls (not shown): dummies for election years, gender, 40 years old or younger, three education levels, ten income brackets, unemployed, self-employed, IVS waves, countries.*** : p<0.01, * : p<0.1

Table 2
Post-materialism and attitudes to government responsibilities

Table 3
Conditional effects of post-materialism on ownership attitudes

Table 4
Conditional effects of post-materialism on responsibility attitudes