Survivalism and Public Opinion on Criminality: A Cross-National Analysis of Prostitution

Explanations of variability in public opinion on crime have drawn disproportionately from the literature on specific symbolic orientations including religious fundamentalism and racial prejudice. In contrast, this article hypothesizes that public opinion is linked to the strength of a general cultural axis of nations: survivalism vs. self-expressionism. Data are from the fourth wave of the World Values Survey. Hierarchical modeling techniques are used to sort out the bi-level effects of survivalist culture on the approval of prostitution. Controlling for all other predictors, the personal survivalism index was the most powerful predictor of prostitution acceptability, followed by the country-level survivalism index. Unlike previous investigations, which relied on specific symbolic orientations, the present results suggest that attitudes about criminality are linked to a generalized cultural axis.