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296 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

The same conclusion emerges from 2008 Eurobarometer data. Across
twenty-six European countries, the percentage of respondents choosing
“freedom of speech” as a goal to be pursued for the future is strongly
correlated with indulgence. The same holds for the percentage who
select “democracy” as most important in connection with their idea of
happiness. 47
In the preceding chapters the occurrences of freedom of expression
and of democratic government in a country have been shown to be related

to people’s values in the fields of power distance, individualism, and uncer-
tainty avoidance. The correlations with IVR show another infl uence on
how people in a country feel about the related political ideals.
Not only does the indulgence index predict attitudes toward national
governance in paper-and-pencil studies, but also it is de facto negatively

correlated with the number of police officers per 100,000 people across
48
forty-one countries for which data are available. Societies that are more
restrained are more serious about their restrictiveness—they have more
police officers per capita.

Table 8.3 completes the key differences between indulgent and
restrained societies described in this chapter.

Origins of Societal Differences in
Indulgence Versus Restraint

As in the case of most other cultural dimensions, it is hard to explain with
certainty what historical processes have created the differences in indul-
gence versus restraint that we observe today. One possible explanation
was offered by Misho in an article for the anthropological Sage journal
49
Cross-Cultural Research as well as in his previous publications. He argues
that indulgent societies do not have a millennia-old history of Eurasian

intensive agriculture stretching all the way to the present.
Traditionally, intensive agriculture was never practiced in sub-
Saharan Africa. Some forms of such agriculture existed in some places
in the Americas, but just as in Africa, no draught animals were available
there, which was a severe impediment to its development. As for the Scan-
dinavian and English-speaking countries, the cultural legacy of traditional
intensive agriculture has long since been overcome. Highly intensive agri-
culture of the Eurasian type brought innumerable calamities upon those
who practiced it: strenuous work, alternating periods of food abundance