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

Abstract

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.