Agency, Values, and Well-Being: A Human Development Model

This paper argues that feelings of agency are linked to human well-being through a sequence of adaptive mechanisms that promote human development, once existential conditions become permissive. In the first part, we elaborate on the evolutionary logic of this model and outline why an evolutionary perspective is helpful to understand changes in values that give feelings of agency greater weight in shaping human well-being. In the second part, we test the key links in this model with data from the World Values Surveys using ecological regressions and multi-level models, covering some 80 societies worldwide. Empirically, we demonstrate evidence for the following sequence: (1) in response to widening opportunities of life, people place stronger emphasis on emancipative values, (2) in response to a stronger emphasis on emancipative values, feelings of agency gain greater weight in shaping people’s life satisfaction, (3) in response to a greater impact of agency feelings on life satisfaction, the level of life satisfaction itself rises. Further analyses show that this model is culturally universal because taking into account the strength of a society’s western tradition does not render insignificant these adaptive linkages. Precisely because of its universality, this is indeed a ‘human’ development model in a most general sense

Social media, television talk shows, and political change in Egypt

At least two pivotal moments in Egypt’s 2011 uprising took place on talk shows on the country’s private satellite television channels. In seeking to understand how these shows evolved, under authoritarian rule, to the point where they could host such moments, this article explores the impact of online media on their evolution. Taking account of studies into online–offline media interaction in democratic and nondemocratic settings, the research traces processes behind the rise of oppositional talk on Egyptian television during three consecutive periods. It finds that these had as much to do with particularities of national politics and economics as with transnational digital networks. Indeed, it was the restrictions on mainstream media that pushed political communication online, which validates Kraidy’s theory of hypermedia space, where multiple points of access to digital media are seen to facilitate contestation of the status quo. Yet, unequal offline power relations continue to shape these access points