Cultural Churn: Global Variation in the Instability of National Cultures

How stable are national cultures over time—and why do some societies experience more instability than others? Cultural instability—the extent to which a society’s overall configuration of values changes from one period to the next—has profound implications for identity, social cohesion, and political conflict, yet it has not been directly measured at the cross-national level. We introduce a novel, broad-scale measure of cultural instability, which we term cultural churn. Rather than tracking directional change along a single value dimension, this index measures the degree to which a country’s entire configuration of cultural values shifts over time. Applying the cultural fixation index—a multivariate cultural distance statistic—to six sequential waves of the World Values Survey (1989–2022) covering 71 countries, we find striking variation in cultural churn. In some countries, the cultural shifts observed over several years were as large as the cultural differences between separate nations, whereas in other countries, the national culture remained virtually identical. Multilevel regression models and specification curve analyses tested 31 country-level predictors of cross-national variation in cultural churn. Countries undergoing greater socioeconomic development and modernization tended to experience more cultural churn, as did countries with greater cultural tightness.