Europe's value systems have been tested by a decade of overlapping shocks — financial instability, pandemic emergency government, contested migration, democratic backsliding, and war returned to the continent. What remains unsettled is whether that pressure has produced a common European reaction or a widening divergence: in some contexts a defensive consolidation of liberal norms, in others a hardening of nativist, authoritarian and anti-institutional dispositions. Survey evidence points both ways, often within the same country and cohort. That discrepancy is the analytical problem this panel takes up.
Three questions organise the session. First, how are orientations toward democracy, liberty and political authority shifting across European countries and generational cohorts — and are those movements period effects tied to identifiable crises, cohort replacement, or genuine within-cohort conversion? Second, do younger Europeans formed under structural precarity and digital saturation develop cosmopolitan or defensive identities, and under which labour-market, housing and institutional conditions does each prevail? Third, how does intensive digitization reconfigure values of privacy, trust, legitimacy and participation once platform mediation becomes the ordinary channel of political experience rather than an exceptional one?
The session welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions — quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods — including work with ESS, EVS/WVS, Eurobarometer, national panels and original fieldwork. Comparative designs are particularly encouraged: cross-national and cross-regional comparison within Europe, papers that distinguish cohort from period effects, analyses that treat polarization as a measured relation rather than an assumed background, and studies that locate European trajectories within global dynamics of democratic erosion and ideological realignment.
The panel is convened within COST Action CA24150 (VISTA — Values in Turbulent Times), a pan-European network examining how contemporary crises reshape collective values, whose cross-national membership secures coverage of Western, Central and Eastern, Southern and Nordic Europe. Its ambition is cumulative rather than additive: papers will be discussed against a shared comparative frame — which value orders are moving, in which direction, at what speed, and with what consequences for the institutional legitimacy of liberal democracy — so that the session closes with a comparative argument, not a sequence of national reports. The turbulence has already reordered European values; naming that reordering precisely is the work.
