Replication data for: Democracy, Economy, and Values: Estimating a Recursive System

With three waves of the World Value Survey (WVS) completed, covering about 15 years, we now have the beginnings of a time-series of data regarding the values of citizens in a wide sample of countries. With similar series already available indicating the extent of political and civil liberties (democracy, from Freedom House) and economic development (real GNP-per-capita, from the World Bank), we can begin to address exciting questions of temporal, and hopefully thereby causal, priority in these important concepts. Do populations’ values that conduce toward democracy precede the establishment of democratic institutions, or do democratic institutions foster such values? Does economic development foster democracy, or do democratic institutions facilitate economic growth? Does economic development precede the growth of self-expression values over survival values or do such values foster growth, perhaps by strengthening democracy? In short, these data offer exciting opportunities to begin to answer some important questions about what causes what, and by what route, among values, economy, and democracy.