The Post-Modern Society: Which are the Basic Value-Orientations?

Political behaviour like voting or allegiance to political parties istoday less a function of the social structure and more an expression of the value orientations that the electorate harbours. The new research into political culture has resulted in numerous findings concerning the role of dominant value orientations like post-materialism, trust and gender or egalitarianism as well as individualism. In this article, we examine a question never resolved in the political culture research, namely if the dominant value orientations are independent of each other or not. We show that this is really the case meaning that ordinary people have multiple value orientations, which increases the complexity of politics in the post-modern society. One really cannot speak of one set of values that would constitute the set of values for the post-modern society.