Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to the Comparative Study of Values

Values are at the core of citizens´ vision of right and wrong and are at the origins of attitudes and human behaviour. They are deeply interrelated with material conditions and value change has explained relevant variations across time and across societies on human visions and its crystallization into policies, social processes and moral principles. For decades, European Values Study (EVS) and World Values Survey (WVS) have been tracking the effect of social modernization and human development (including political, scientific, and technological changes) which have transformed human value priorities. Since 1981, these programmes have jointly carried out representative national surveys in over 120 countries and societies containing 92 percent of the world’s population representing an invaluable data source for a global network of scholars, Governments, policy makers and international development agencies. Over the years, the EVS and the WVS have proven the importance of population value study and how modernization processes and human development have led through history to a set of transformations in human mindset, and how value structures change according to a range of value preferences and attitudes. Moreover, research on values demonstrates that people’s beliefs play a key role in economic development, emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions, rise of gender equality, and the extent to which societies have effective government.
We welcome submissions based on EVS/WVS data addressing substantive and/or methodological aspects of value research. Recent joint EVS-WVS dataset (2017-2022) and the EVS-WVS trend file (1981-2022) allow social and political sciences to broaden and deepen their analysis. We invite papers which make use of the EVS/WVS data -solely or in combination with other types of data- to address a broad scope of issues, including political culture and political attitudes, support for democracy and political participation, perceptions of gender equality and moral values, identity and trust, civil society, corruption, solidarity, and migration among the others. We also invite papers addressing the projects’ methodological aspects, including challenges and limitations such as reliability and equivalence of employed scales and indicators, non-responses, combining self- and interviewer-administered mode and other.