Individual Perceptions of the Value of Leisure: The Influence of the Social Democratic Welfare State and Leftist Values Systems

In this work, the authors intend to show that a population’s experience with Marxist governance and an individual’s political ideology conditions individual perceptions of the value of leisure. The authors look into the cross-national variations of the perception of the value that individuals place on leisure, using a database with over 84,000 observations from the World Values Survey from 2010-2014. The authors postulate that Marxist leisure values that have permeated societies either via social democratic welfare states or a socialist welfare state experience create expectations for leisure and that the individual’s self-identification on a left/right political spectrum plays a role in influencing perceptions of the importance of leisure. Several individual-level indicators are used, to ensure that individual-level explanations are taken into account. The authors show that placing value upon leisure is influenced by social democratic regimes and a person’s political ideology on a left/right continuum.


Introduction
There are many things that impact upon perceptions of leisure, such as culture, demographics, and attitudes and there is a large and growing literature that has dealt with perceptions of leisure and the ethics of leisure (see, for example; Fennell 2006; Lovelock & Lovelock, 2013). While a great deal is known about attitudes towards leisure within countries (see, for example, Cyba, 1992;Lee & Tideswell, 2005;Rahkonen et al., 2016) and while much has been researched regarding ethical issues and leisure (see, for example, Sylvester, 2008;Sylvester, 1987), there is a need to understand how the political environment and political attitudes impact upon perceptions of leisure. Since political attitudes are something that informs a worldview and impacts upon a person's ethical compass, we look into how the political environment and general political attitudes impact upon how individuals perceive the importance of leisure in their lives.
There is reason to believe that political attitudes and ideologies have an impact upon attitudes towards leisure and tourism. For this work, we use Veal's (2010) definition of an ideology being a set of internally consistent ideas about how society should be run. In modern societies, there are a number of ideologies that compete against each other. Two leading textbooks in comparative politics (O'Neil, 2012;Draper & Ramsay, 2012) isolate a few ideologies that are available. O'Neil (2012) describes the major ideologies as communism, social democracy, liberalism, fascism, and anarchism. Draper and Ramsay (2012) only mention social democracy, "extreme market democracy," Christian democracy, and communism. Finding a middle ground in which the world is not oversimplified in terms of ideologies nor too complicated, is no easy task for the authors of textbooks on ideology and some authors take a much more complex view of the panoply of political ideologies.
More sophisticated discussions on political ideologies discuss far more possibilities (see, for example; Macris, 1986;Schumaker et al., 1997;Sargent, 1996;Vincent, 2009). While these authors generally divide the major ideologies into a few short categories (conservatism, liberalism, anarchism, Marxism, fascism/national socialism, and environmentalism), they do not deal with the categories in a uniform way. For example, Schumaker (1997) differentiates between "traditional" and "contemporary" conservatism. In a similar fashion, these key authors make distinctions between forms of liberalism and Marxism. What is also noteworthy is that these authors engage with other types of ideologies that do not fit into the neat categories offered by the introductory texts of comparative politics (O'Neil, 2012;Draper & Ramsay, 2012). These other ideologies include feminism, fundamentalism, nationalism, "Third World ideologies," liberation theology, and Islam (Schumaker et al., 1997;Sargent, 1996). This variety of approaches is echoed in the tourism literature (Veal, 2010). Some of these ideologies are fairly modern, since some of them (such as feminism and Islam) suggest complex systems for understanding social and economic reality and give a great deal of guidance with regards to political solutions to social and economic problems. While there are other political considerations that can be mentioned, such as authoritarianism and totalitarianism, these are not political philosophies. Rather, they are non-democratic tendencies and approaches to the use of power relative to a population. As such, they are outside the scope of this analysis, which focusses specifically on political ideologies.
The literature on ideologies highlights that there are several forms of organized ways of thinking that have prevailed, some of them Marxist in origin. The two major ways of conceptualizing Marxism are the revolutionary/Leninist form and the evolutionary/social democratic form. These two forms of Marxism evolved in the beginning of the 20th century over the very pragmatic and ideological argument regarding how socialism was to be achieved. While social democrats are Marxists, they believe in an evolutionary movement within market economies bringing in the socialist phase of history. This is something that Communists reject, as they contend that the bourgeoisie's political system will prevent any meaningful strides towards socialism. While many contemporary social democrats in Europe may not identify the roots of their way of thinking, the historical development of their political parties and political history reveals that their political parties and ideologies are descendants of 19 th century Marxism.
Historically, there was a massive disagreement within the Marxist parties in Europe regarding how to achieve socialism. The major ideological rift resulted in the split in Germany's Social Democratic party that came to a head during World War One, resulting in a group of Marxists forming the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) in reaction to the SPD's complicity with the Kaiser's request for funding for the war effort. The USPD eventually developed into the KPD (Communist Party of Germany). A similar split occurred among the Marxists in Russia, leading to the now familiar language of Bolsheviks (a faction that developed into the Communist Party) and the Mensheviks (a social democratic faction that originally ran the government of Russia following the abdication of the Russian Czar).
While both of these factions of Marxism have battled each other fiercely (sometimes ideologically and sometimes in a literal sense), they have commonalities in that both claim to be the political voice of the working class. Since they are both based upon working class foundations, they have a similar class bias and many similarities in terms of the policies they follow and desire. One of those policies deals with attitudes towards sports, leisure, and tourism.
Proponents of both of these forms of Marxism have very similar attitudes towards leisure (Veal, 2010), with both championing public provision of leisure and extolling leisure as an entitlement of all people. Both of these ideological variants of Marxism view the divisions of humans in societies as something based upon economic relationships that have created two classes. The liberation of the working class is therefore done, in part, by creating entitlements to leisure. Indeed, what is a noteworthy feature of any country that has a strong Marxist past is the existence of large public leisure amenities. In those countries with powerful social democratic and Communist parties, one often finds large parks and other recreation facilities. Whether in social democratic Scandinavia or the Soviet Union and its satellite states, large parks, leisure facilities, and sporting facilities made available either for free usage or at nominal fees were, or still are, the norm. In opposition to these Marxist approaches to leisure, liberal and conservative approaches typically stress that leisure is something the private sector should provide (Veal, 2010) and that it is not an entitlement to all. While many public amenities exist in more liberal societies, the prevalence of public facilities available to the general public at little or no cost are more commonplace in social democratic and Communist regimes.
Since political ideologies are embedded in political parties and political parties play a role in lawmaking, political ideologies influenced political choices with regards to leisure. For example, Table 1 illustrates that there is a significant variation in terms of the hours that people work in some selected Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. A casual look at the data illustrates how many of the countries that work the fewest hours per worker are commonly described as social democratic. For example, Norway, the Netherlands, and Denmark, countries typically described as social democratic and that have had strong social democratic parties dominating their governments since World War Two, work the fewest hours, apart from Germany. These hours are based largely upon labor legislation and this is a major concern for social democratic parties, as the political representatives of the working class. While the data show that people in different countries work dissimilar numbers of hours per year, they also suggest that labor legislation and the level of development play a role in how long people work in countries. Because the amount of leisure that is available to citizens differs from country to country and because the amount of leisure that is available is at least partly dependent upon political choices (labor legislation), researchers need to learn more about how political influences play a role in forming attitudes towards leisure. Here, we explore how Marxism, in its two prevailing forms, has influenced values towards leisure as well as exploring how individual attitudes towards politics influences attitudes towards leisure.

Literature Review
There is a great deal of literature looking into variations on perspectives about leisure. Some authors have looked at the dissimilarities between countries from a purely theoretical perspective (Hollander, 1966;Zowisło, 2010) while others have looked upon the development of the field of leisure reviewing how the field has perceived the question of the motivation of leisure (Chick, 1998;Chen & Pang, 2012).
A common approach to leisure values is a cultural one, positing that cultural attitudes influence attitudes towards leisure. One vein in the literature looks upon changes in leisure values in Asian economies and societies. There is an impressive amount written about leisure in China (see, for example, Chick et al., 2008;Yan, 2013;Xiao, 1997), Korea (Lee & Kim, 2005), and Japan (Fuess, 2012;Mitani, 2012). There are others authors who approach the impact of culture more broadly, focusing upon international tourists and their leisure (Gursoy & Gavcar, 2003), or how religious and cultural differences impact upon leisure practices (see for example, Engel-Yeger, 2012).
There has been some research that investigates leisure values and ethics, looking into cross-national differences, generational differences, and gender differences in terms of perceptions of leisure. Craig and Mullan (2013) deal with issues of gender and leisure in five countries. In their work, they find that there are differences in leisure time for the populations in five countries (Australia, United States, France, Italy, and Denmark), with Danish respondents having the most time for leisure in the five countries studied. Gagliardi et al. (2007) focus upon older peoples' leisure activities in several countries (Germany, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Italy) to learn about how the elderly spend their leisure time. There are some other noteworthy pieces that look at how approaches towards leisure change over generations and how this is reflected in relationships and attitudes toward leisure (Sicilia-Camacho et al., 2008;Tweng et al., 2010). These articles do not look at changes and differences in terms of leisure attitudes between countries, but use survey techniques to learn about how different generations view leisure within a country.
However, there are two noteworthy pieces of research that take a multilevel approach towards the analysis of leisure (Wang & Wong, 2014;Verbakel 2013). Wang and Wong (2014) used data from the 2007 survey from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) to analyse about 48,000 respondents in 33 countries. Their research focusses upon the impact that leisure has upon happiness in 33 countries, finding that the quality and quantity of leisure play a role in conditioning happiness. What is interesting about this research is that it uses a multilevel approach, looking at how individual attributes (demographics and attitudes) and characteristics (GDP, unemployment rate, and political stability) of the countries in which the individual lives may play a role in terms of conditioning a person's subjective measure of happiness.
A much more relevant work is Verbakel (2013). In her work, the most recent wave of the European Values Study 2008 was used with a sample of over 57,000 respondents from 44 countries and 2 regions (Northern Ireland and Northern Cyprus) in Europe. Her research looked at the various economic and cultural influences upon perceptions of leisure, employing a model that used both country-level and individual-level independent variables. What is most relevant for this research is that one of the independent variables used in the analysis was a dummy variable to denote those countries that had a Communist heritage. What is noteworthy is that the dummy variable denoting Communist heritage had a clear and consistent impact upon perceptions on leisure, since "a communist past has an enduring effect on the way people think about learning new things in leisure time; despite the upcoming market economies…" (Verbakel, 2013, pp. 681). Craig and Mullan (2013) found that Denmark was different in terms of leisure in their sample, referencing the political impact of social democracy and the social democratic welfare regime of the country. In addition, Verbakel (2013) found that there was empirical evidence that the Communist heritage of a country would leave a lasting impact upon societies, something asserted by Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln (2007).
In sum, while there is substantial literature dealing with differences in terms of attitudes towards leisure, there is very little known about how political systems and ideas have conditioned populations' ethos towards leisure. While there are some indications that there are variations in attitudes towards leisure based upon political variables, no large-scale investigation has looked at how different types of political experiences have impacted perceptions of leisure.
So while there is some indication that political ideologies have left an impact upon perceptions of leisure, there is no large scale research that has illustrated that Marxist attitudes (whether social democratic or Communist) have permeated societies and made an impact upon how individuals view leisure. In addition, no previous research has drawn a link between an individual's self-placement on a left-right scale and how this impacts upon their view of leisure. Here, we intend to fill in the gap in the research by exploring the empirical relationship between leftist values systems, as embodied in institutionalized and historical experiences, and their influence on a person's perspective on the importance of leisure. In addition, we look into how a person's own political philosophy influences attitudes towards leisure.

Methods and Analysis
For this analysis, World Values Survey (WVS) data were used. The World Values Survey is a comprehensive global project of human values. The data gathering for the project takes place in waves that often take years to collect. For this project, Wave 6 data were used, utilizing data from 2010-2014 and included data gathered from 59 countries, as it was in these countries in which a question about leisure values was asked. There are over 85,000 interviews in the database for this wave. Additional data from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) were included in the database for this study, using the Human Development Index (HDI) ranking of 2014 so data would have a more aligned time frame for all variables included in this study, as a control variable.
The dependent variable for this analysis is responses to the following question: "For each of the following, indicate how important it is in your life. Would you say it is…?" One of the matters asked about is "leisure time." Using a four-point scale, respondents were asked to assess the level of importance of leisure time in their life from "very important" to "not at all important." Responses to the question range from "1" leisure time is "very important" to "4" leisure time is "not at all important." The scores were inverted for the purposes of this study so that higher numbers indicate an individual's higher valuation of leisure in her/his life, making interpretation of the data more intuitive. Descriptive statistics for this variable are shown in Table 2, illustrating the data once missing values are removed. In delineating the social democratic states, the work of Esping-Andersen (1990) was consulted. Many welfare states that have elements of social democracy in them although, as empirical classifications show (Esping-Andersen, 1990). While other welfare states have components that are social democratic in them, the social democratic approach to organizing a society prevails in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. For example, the Canadian welfare state is almost entirely liberal in its setup, correcting for market failures and creating state-mandated employment insurance schemes, although the health service is set up upon socialist principles (unsurprisingly instigated by the social democrats).
So, for the dummy variable denoting social democratic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden have been denoted as being social democracies in nature, meaning that the political economies are almost entirely based upon social democratic principles, as opposed to other states such as Germany, Austria, and France in which other ideological principles have had a strong impact upon the development of the welfare state. The social democratic countries are unique in that they have had long-standing influence from social democratic governance almost continuously since the end of World War Two. Their welfare states and school systems reflect social democratic values, even when there are occasional governments that are not dominated by social democratic parties. Their political cultures and welfare states are clearly social democratic in nature and have almost no influence from conservative or liberal visions of how to organize a welfare state. Although 59 countries were included in the study, the Netherlands and Sweden were coded as "social democratic" ("1" denoting social democratic state and "0" denoting non-social democratic state). Despite having only two of the six potentially social democratic regimes in the sample, there were 1902 respondents in the Netherlands and 1206 respondents in Sweden to this particular questionnaire.
The other major independent variable to denote Marxist governance is a dummy variable to denote those countries that had lived under Communist regimes. All the countries that were part of the Soviet Union, all the Eastern Bloc states, all the countries that were part of Yugoslavia, and some other long-standing Communist countries such as Cuba, China, and Vietnam were eligible to be denoted with this dummy variable. Using this as a major independent variable follows on from the work of Verbakel (2013), who used the same logic and independent variable but on a much smaller scale, as her research did not go beyond the scope of Europe. In the sample, those denoted as being Communist states were Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, China, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Each was denoted with a one, as a dummy variable, otherwise countries were denoted with a zero.
A summary of all the other independent variables considered for this analysis is shown in Table 3. There are country-level as well as individual-level control variables used in the analysis. The major political independent variable at the individual level of analysis is a person's selfidentification on the left-right spectrum. The World Values Survey asks respondents to identify themselves on a political scale from left to right. Respondents are given a 10-point scale item with "1" indicating extreme leftists and "10" indicating those on the extreme right. There is considerable overlap in terms of leftist values and Marxism in both its major strands. Since it is possible that a person may reject Marxist thinking but live under a social democratic or Communist regime, this variable is needed to measure an individual's approach towards politics. While the left/right dichotomy may not be as meaningful as it had been when it was first developed after the French Revolution, people in many countries still persist in using the dichotomy, while it seems that the dichotomy may simply be a way of representing preferences for social, political and economic equality (Bobbio, 1997).
In addition, several attitudinal and demographic control variables were employed. The four attitudinal variables taken into account were, feelings of happiness, a subjective assessment of health, overall assessment of life satisfaction, and an overall look at the individual's values system, based upon the materialist/post-materialist index of Inglehart (1990;. These individual-level variables were extracted from the WVS. The relevant individual variables are measured as follows, feeling of happiness (4-point scale, 1=Very happy; 4= Not at all happy), state of health (4-point scale, 1=Very Good; 4=Poor), life satisfaction (10-point scale, 1=Completely dissatisfied; 10=Completely satisfied), marital status, number of children, social class (5-point scale, 1=Upper class; 5=Lower class), gender, highest education attained, and Post-materialist index (3-point scale, 1=Materialist; 2=Mixed; 3=Postmaterialist).

Results
Before conducting the analysis, the dummy variables denoting social democratic regimes, and Communist heritage (or current) regimes, and the HDI categories were included into a data file along with the World Values Survey data. Overall, there are over 80,000 interviews included in the analysis.
To begin delving into the relationship between political ideologies and leisure values, Pearson correlations were performed using the dependent variable of interest and the three political indicators of interest in the analysis. The outcome of the Pearson correlations is shown in Table 4. The bivariate correlations show that the dummy variables denoting social democratic regimes and Communist heritage countries run in two different directions. While these country-level dummy variables indicate, in both instances, a statistically significant relationship, the direction of the relationship runs in opposite directions, although the size of the correlations suggest that many other things are probably influencing leisure values. The data suggest that placing a great deal of value on leisure is higher in those regimes that are deemed social democratic, while Communist heritage regimes are associated with lower levels of valuation of leisure by individuals. What is also interesting is that the finding from the ordinal individual-level indicator shows that there is a relationship between selfidentification on the left/right spectrum with those that claim to be to the "right" valuing leisure less than those who identify themselves with the "left." To assess the relationship among key variables, the analysis was broken into two parts: country-level and individual level. For the country-level analysis, we first used HDI ranking, social democratic states, and the Communist Heritage as independent variables and the perceived importance of leisure time in life as dependent variable. Two different regressions were run, one using ordinal regression, using SPSS, as the dependent variable is a four-point ordinal variable. In addition, another regression was run using OLS regression, using the same variables. The results of the OLS regression are shown in Table 5, for the sake of simplicity, as the MLE and OLS regression outcomes were very similar, indicating very little difference in terms of the relationships between the variables.  Table 5 shows that the model holds little explanatory value with an adjusted R-squared value that is .025. However, this is no surprise, as something as abstract and system-level as political factors are utilized as indicators that are linked with individual lifestyle values. In addition, the high tolerance value (>0.1) and low VIF (<10) indicate that there is no concern with collinearity in the regression. An issue with tens of thousands of observations is that most of the independent variables are correlated with the dependent variable, as the table shows. All of the independent variables used in the analysis meet most standard criteria for statistically significant relationships. The findings generally illustrate what is expected in very large data sets, low R-squared values and independent variables that show a statistical relationship with the dependent variable (Lantz, 2013). What is interesting is the direction of the coefficients, with two of the three indicators suggesting a negative relationship with the dependent variable. In the case of the HDI, since the categories seem to be categorized counterintuitively, the data show that low HDI countries (less developed countries) tend to have people that put less value on their leisure. In addition, it seems that people in those countries with a Communist heritage also put less value on their leisure. However, we see that there is evidence that individuals in social democratic countries value their leisure more than others, even when HDI is controlled for. For the individual-level analysis, two more regressions were run, one using ordered logistic regression and one with OLS regression. The results from the OLS regression are shown in Table 6, as the results of the two regressions had no substantial analytical differences. 233.130 *** Note: *** Significant at p<0.01; ** Significant at p< 0.05 As above, the explanatory value of the model is not particularly strong, with an adjusted R-squared of .042 and many of the independent variables show a statistical relationship with the dependent variable, something expected in large data sets (Lantz, 2013). The high tolerance value (>0.1) and low VIF (<10) indicate that there is no concern with collinearity in the regression, despite the large number of independent variables employed in the analysis. However, what is interesting is that in a simple regression, using only the political variable as the independent variable, the adjusted Rsquared statistic is only .002, so that the incorporation of the control variables leads to a substantial increase in the explanatory value of the model. As above, the independent variables and the directions of the coefficients are not particularly surprising. In addition, most of the independent variables would be considered to be statistically significant, something not particularly surprising in a dataset of tens of thousands of observations. However, there are two surprises, as the independent variables denoting gender and social class seem to show no evidence of a relationship to the dependent variable.
The key variable in the analysis is political values. It seems that the relationship between political value systems (left/right) are related as shown in the bivariate correlations, meaning that right-wing attitudes are not related to placing value upon leisure. However, some of the other independent variables suggest thought-provoking relationships. One of the most interesting relationships shown is that older and more-educated respondents seem to value leisure more than younger and lesseducated respondents. Other interesting demographic aspects that seem to influence attitudes towards leisure are marriage and number of children, it seems that the direction of the coefficients suggest that married people put less value on leisure than others. In addition, there is evidence that having more children suppresses an individual's valuation of her/his leisure. In addition, it seems that life satisfaction is linked with higher valuation of leisure.

Conclusion
What the data shows is that political environments and political attitudes seem to play a role in terms of conditioning a person's attitude towards leisure, whether she or he knows it or not. The analysis shows that while most Leninist regimes may have faded into history, they have left an imprint in the post-Leninist societies, as has been asserted (Alesina & Fuchs-Schündeln, 2007), although the relationship is a bit different than expected. We find no support for the notion that Communist regimes created a culture that demands leisure, although the long-term institutionalization of a working class-friendly ideology was something we expected to have left a lasting impact upon the political sociology of formerly Communist-led populations.
The analysis also shows that the social democratic mindset has had a long-lasting stamp upon populations in social democratic regimes, tending to influence individuals to value their leisure more highly than otherwise. This stands in contrast to the lack of evidence of Marxist influence in formerly Communist-ruled countries. While the Communist regimes and social democratic states have had institutionalized structures that are pro-working class, it seems that the social democratic welfare state has infused the minds of its citizenry in ways that make the citizens value leisure for themselves, although the influence of the social democracy is modest.
In addition, it seems that at the individual level, political ideologies play a role in terms of conditioning a person's approach towards leisure, with people with right-wing tendencies putting less value upon their leisure than others. This followed from what we expected, as left-wing ideologies (largely influenced by Marxists) tend to favor working class leisure. While political ideologies seem to impact upon a person's stance on leisure, there are likely many intervening variables influencing a person's approach to leisure. It is likely that other social, cultural, and economic considerations are more directly linked with approaches towards leisure, such as demographic characteristics, that are a direct reflection of lifestyle, such as the availability of time for leisure because of family obligations or education.
The findings go beyond that Craig and Mullan (2013) hinted at and what Verbakel (2013) found to be empirically true. While Craig and Mullan (2013) explained how social democracy played a role in changing law and conditions for people's leisure, they did not solidly show this to be true for many countries, merely highlighting the Danish experience and explaining that it created a different environment for the experience of leisure than for other countries. Verbakel (2013) did show that Communist heritage played an important role but did not show how this was true outside of Europe. From a global study, we call into question whether Communist governance actually did influence individuals' stance on the value of leisure. This research should be considered a substantial contribution to the literature on tourism and political ideologies (Webster & Ivanov, 2016a;Webster & Ivanov, 2016b;Webster, et al., 2011). Since tourism and leisure are shaped by the politics of a place and since perceptions of reality are shaped by ideological forces, we can expect that political ideologies should continue to be something that will influence leisure and industry for travel, tourism, and hospitality for some time. It is likely that the impact of ideologies on the organization of tourism and leisure will continue into the future (Webster &Ivanov, 2012).
All-in-all, the findings are suggestive that, at best, political values either as institutionalized into state regimes or at the individual level, have only a modest impact upon leisure values. Future research should delve further into the political realm to see how political ideas influence leisure attitudes in the social world. More sophisticated models of the influence of political thinking are needed in terms of understanding how it influences individual value systems. However, these finding suggest a starting point, by looking into how social welfare states influence thinking, while, apparently, Communist regimes did not.
While the analysis of the data is useful and give a good global analysis of the links between political ideology and leisure, future research should continue to look at large-scale social experiences that have shaped the expectations of populations for leisure. Hopefully in the future, better data will come available enabling researchers to look more clearly into the generational differences within societies. For example, there is reason to believe that those who grew up in a socialist environment may have a very different perspective on leisure than those who grew up following the events of the autumn of 1989, when many socialist regimes collapsed. With better data from more countries, a great deal more can be learned about attitudes in different countries and by measuring how ideologies that crossed over borders could impact upon the attitudes that individuals have on leisure and related activities/industries (travel, tourism, and hospitality).
In terms of tourism policy, the findings suggest some implications, especially in a globalized economy. One issue is that marketing may take political philosophies into account when marketing tourism to populations. While leisure may be considered by some to be apolitical, individuals seem to be shaped by their political environments and thus have expectations towards leisure that will vary by the individual and differ from country to country due to the different ways in which political philosophies have embedded themselves into the political bureaucracy of countries, including the public school systems. So, marketing may take somewhat different approaches to different market segments, taking political attitudes and political socialization into account.
Future research should look more into how political ideas, political parties, and political regimes create imprints upon individuals and expectations for leisure. These political things seem to play a role in terms of conditioning individual values systems regarding leisure. More investigations into how political ideas permeate society's sense of leisure should be done, as purely cultural or economic explanations seem to be lacking, as they miss the important role that political ideas play in the formation of an ethos of leisure. Future research should also look at the source of people's perceptions of the importance of leisure, whether it is from a political ideology or from cultural expectations/ traditions, the two of which may be interconnected. While there is some modest evidence found here, we know that other factors are influencing leisure values of populations.
Future research should also look more into generational differences with regards to leisure. In Communist heritage regimes, it may be the case that there is a generational difference since older generations and the newer ones grew up in very different circumstances. It may be that the older generation of those living under communist regimes had experiences that were influenced by the concept of the entitlement of leisure. It may well be that the younger generations have been scrambling to make a living, rather living as their elders had, epitomized by the saying "[T]hey pretend to pay us; we pretend to work." One thing that the data seem to show is that there is a positive feedback loop at play with Marxism and its relationship to leisure. When institutionalized, Marxism can create a leisure entitlement, something very different from different ideologies (Veal, 2010). Even when Marxist regimes fall, the expectations set by the political parties and ideologies that create entitlements for leisure for all citizens will be faced by opposition from citizens who have had raised hopes. All-in-all, the data have shown us that ethics towards leisure is not an apolitical thing but in some ways conditioned by political ideas, sometimes in the form of types of welfare states (whether in the present or the past), but sometimes simply in people's heads. The modest findings bring up a critical point, that leisure is political and that future research in the values of leisure should take into account political attitudes and the political environment in which leisure values are formed, as leisure in not just a market transaction or an economic good, but a political value.