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.

Degree of political attention towards tourism: An analysis of party manifestos during German federal elections

“…As a result of this, Shone and Memon (2008) propose an equation between the change in governments with a change in ideologies resulting in a change in how tourism issues are addressed. However, this may be to a certain extent unbalanced by either a desire to retain control (Webster and Ivanov, 2016) and the predominant ideology of society with regard to leisure and tourism activities (Webster et al, 2020) or the type of governmental regime (Webster et al, 2010).…”