In the seventies, the sociologist, Ronald Inglehart, devised a set of concepts and indicators, in order to analyse the values of democratic industrialised societies and their transformations and, subsequently, to observe changes from a “Materialist” cultural trend to a cultural trend with Post-Materialist values. That is, from societal values focused on physical and economic security to values centred on freedom and autonomy, self-expression and quality of life. This essay offers an insight into the search for these Post-Materialist values in latinamerican parliamentary elites. In order to do so, an index of post-materiality was carried out among members of parliament. Subsequently, statistical analyses have been made to determine the presence of these values in the legislative power of each country. Thus, this study presents two essential objectives: to present a description of the region’s political arena in terms of the legislators’ views in the Materialist/Post-Materialist dimension; and to offer possible explanations to the variance of the results obtained. The aforementioned will be considered from a micro-perspective, with an analysis on an individual basis, as well as from a macro-perspective, where the position of each legislative chamber will be the unit of analysis. This could present a problem of individualistic fallacy by inferring the nature of a collective actor – the legislative chamber – from individual results. Notwithstanding, as in most studies of political culture, this analysis will make use of micro-variables in order to explain the variation between legislators and, in the case of collective actors, aggregate variables.
