Values at the ballot and in the streets: Exploring the role of basic human values in political participation in Europe

Understanding the motivational foundations of political engagement is a key issue in democratic societies. This study examines how higher-order personal values relate to conventional (e.g., voting) and unconventional (e.g., demonstrations) forms of participation. Based on Schwartz?s theory, we focus on Self-Transcendence, Self-Enhancement, Openness to Change, and Conservation values. Data come from the 11th wave of the European Social Survey (2023), with 39,573 respondents from 25 European countries. Values were measured using the 21-item Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ-21), while participation was coded dichotomously across four conventional and four unconventional activities. Freedom House scores were included to capture cross-national variation in civil liberties and political rights. Multilevel logistic regression models were estimated for each type of participation, controlling for sociodemographic and societal factors. The results show that values significantly predict both forms of activism. Self-Enhancement and Self-Transcendence increased the likelihood of conventional participation, while Conservation reduced it. These effects were moderated by national freedom levels, with Self-Enhancement linked negatively to participation in free countries, but positively in partly free ones. For unconventional participation, Self-Transcendence and Openness to Change promoted activism, whereas Self-Enhancement and Conservation discouraged it. Overall, the findings indicate that conventional and unconventional engagement rest on partly distinct value foundations and are dependent on socio-political context.