Navigating Values Under Pressure

European societies find themselves confronted with a loss of certainties about their future. Widespread hopes for perpetual economic wealth, ever-extending individual liberties and physical well-being, indestructible political stability, and being safe from military threats have been shattered by the cumulated experience of economic crises, a pandemic, increasingly catastrophic impacts of climate change, and military aggression in the rather immediate neighborhood.

It has been observed that such profound changes in individual and collective life chances clearly affect short-term social and political preferences, which is one likely reason for a widespread loss of trust in established institutions and a surge of populist parties and politicians reaching for power. For social researchers, that raises the question of whether more foundational attitudes, usually called "values", are also beginning to shift already. Values are conceptually understood to describe belief systems that are mainly established at juvenile age during socialisation and then remain comparatively stable over the individual life course. Further, it has often been claimed that values set moral boundaries for the shorter-term social and political attitudes that people can develop. Per their stability, change in values should mainly happen through generational replacement. Adding their proclaimed normative consistency requirements, shared societal values should then form a buffer against rapid attitudinal changes. That kind of buffer could have normatively positive implications - if, for example, universalism as a value slows down the further erosion of support for liberal democracy, - or normatively negative implications, if, for example, materialism potentially hinders the acceptance of measures against climate change.

The severity of the recent, ongoing, and likely future, changes in political, economic, and environmental conditions now raises the question of how stable established values actually are, and how much they actually pose constraints on the attitudes that are more directly guiding individual short-term preferences and actions. Cross-national repeated studies, i.e. the EVS, WVS, and ESS, as well as other surveys, provide well-suited data sources for answering such questions.

The European Values Study, in cooperation with the World Values Survey Association and the European Social Survey ERIC, organizes a conference to reflect on these issues and specifically invites contributions that ask questions such as:

• Whether, in a backward-looking perspective, we have already observed value change that occurs faster than generational replacement would have led us to expect?
• What, in a forward-looking perspective, the baseline is for further changes to expect under the impact of the current and upcoming changes?
• How strong the relationship between foundational values and political or social attitudes really is, especially under conditions of societal crisis and stress?

Outside that focus, we also welcome other contributions using EVS, WVS, ESS data, regardless of the specific topical area, that allow taking stock of European societies in advance of the new data collection waves of the values studies.

Please send an abstract of not more than 250 words to secretariat.evs@gmail.com  by 15 September 2024. Acceptance decisions will be communicated by end of September 2024.

Conference organizing committee: Markus Quandt (EVS), Vera Lomazzi (EVS), Kseniya Kizilova (WVS), Ruxandra Comanaru (ESS Eric), Beatrice Elena Chromková Manea (EVS), Claudiu Tufis (EVS), Quita Muis (EVS).

Secretariat support: Francesca Bellini (EVS)