Secularism—i.e., the separation between the state and religious institutions—is a fundamental characteristic of liberal democracies, yet support for secular arrangements varies significantly across Western countries. In Canada, such attitudinal divergences are observable at the regional level, with citizens from Quebec displaying higher levels of support for secularism than other Canadians. In this paper, we test three hypotheses to account for this regional discrepancy: religiosity, liberal values, and out-group prejudice. Using data from an online panel survey (n = 2,000), our findings suggest that support for secularism in Quebec is mostly explained by the province's lower baseline levels of religiosity, anticlerical feelings, and by its distinctive understanding of liberalism. These factors are likely to result from Quebec's unique religious and sociohistorical history. Results also suggest that while negative feelings toward religious minorities are positively correlated with support for secularism across the entire country, negative feelings toward ethnic minorities are associated with lower support for secularism in Quebec. These findings disprove the commonly held assumption according to which support for secularism is driven by ethnic prejudice in Quebec.

Analyses of US panel surveys from 1992 to 1996 have found extremity in political values was associated with increased affective polarization, but that affective polarization was not associated with changes in value extremity during this period (Enders and Lupton, 2021). This note reevaluates the relationships between political value extremity and affective polarization using a 2016–2020 panel survey. Replicating Enders and Lupton's analytical procedures as closely as possible with this more recent sample, I find value extremity is sometimes associated with increased affective polarization. In contrast to Enders and Lupton (2021), however, affective polarization is strongly associated with increased value extremity between 2016 and 2020. These findings suggest that the relationships between political values and affective polarization may have changed since the 1990s, and that values are now influenced by Americans' evaluations of salient political objects, such as parties, presidential candidates, and ideological groups.

In the 2016 United States presidential election, candidates Trump and Clinton embraced the demands of certain social groups and in this way, politically and symbolically, chose to “own” the social identities of these groups. Trump decided to attack the Latino community, while Clinton positioned herself as an advocate for this community. This article presents the results of a social narrative analysis of the values that Clinton and her team used to reach out to Latino communities during the 2016 election. The Spanish-language messages produced by the Democratic campaign compose the sample, which includes blog posts, Facebook posts, tweets, and television ads. Clinton’s campaign produced narratives about who the “good Latinos” are and, consequently, the “good immigrants” while at the same time promoting values such as globalism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. Paradoxically, these narratives and values failed to portray Latinos’ diversity because they left out this community’s historical, social, and cultural complexity.

This article analyses data from the 2015 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to investigate the differentiated political values of the middle class in China. Combining the two factors of market situation and institutional division, the article first categorizes several basic types of middle class and then identifies two kinds of political values (liberal and conservative) from the indicators of support for freedom, government satisfaction, and political voting. The results show that the middle class, as a whole, tends to be more liberal than the working class. However, the internal divisions among the sub-groups in the middle class are more obvious – the political tendency of the middle class within the redistribution system is conservative but the middle class sub-groups outside the system, especially the new middle class, have the most liberal tendencies and constitute a potential source for change in China. Thus, the middle class is not necessarily a stabilizer or a subverter of the status quo and has a heterogeneous nature shaped by the dual forces of markets and institutions.

This study focuses on the theoretical links between two important ingredients of individuals’ fundamental political values (i.e. authoritarian ideology and national attachment) and their life satisfaction assessments in an authoritarian context. We employ data from a 2016 national public survey in China to empirically examine how these political values relate to Chinese citizens’ life satisfaction. Our regression analyses demonstrate that Chinese citizens with stronger authoritarian ideology and national attachment are likely to report a higher level of life satisfaction. Our study contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the importance of the connections between political values and citizen life satisfaction. It also advances our understanding of the origins of social and political stability in authoritarian regimes, where citizen life satisfaction usually represents a major source of state legitimacy.

Party identification has been thought to provide the central organizing element for political belief systems. This article makes the contrasting case that core values concerning equality and government intervention versus individualism and free enterprise are fundamental orientations that can themselves shape partisanship. The authors evaluate these arguments in the British case using a validated multiple-item measure of core values, using ordered latent class models to estimate reciprocal effects with partisanship on panel data from the British Household Panel Study, 1991–2007. The findings demonstrate that core values are more stable than partisanship and have far stronger cross-lagged effects on partisanship than vice versa in both polarized and depolarized political contexts, for younger and older respondents, and for those with differing levels of educational attainment and income, thus demonstrating their general utility as decision-making heuristics.

This essay seeks to defend the claim that political philosophy ought to be appropriately guided by the phenomenon of politics that it seeks to both offer a theory of and, especially in its normative guise, offer a theory for. It does this primarily through the question of political values. It begins by arguing that for any value to qualify as a value for the political domain, it must be intelligible in relation to the constitutive features of politics as a human activity. It then examines the extent to which the preconditions for the realization of values in practice ought to figure in our considerations as to whether they are values that fit or belong to our social world. We can understand these parts of the essay as responding to two related questions, respectively: (i) Is this a political value at all? — which is to ask, is it a value that is appropriate for the political realm?; and then (ii) Is this a political value for us? The final section responds to the often-made complaint that political philosophy ought not to make any concessions to the actual world of politics as it really is, arguing that attending to the realities of politics, and in particular the constitutive conditions of political activity, gives meaning to the enterprise as the theorization of politics (and not something else). Furthermore those same conditions provide the limits of intelligibility beyond which ideals and values can no longer be, in any meaningful sense, ideals and values for the political sphere.

Poland's post-communist development is often depicted as a contrast between a unified, engaged society of pre-1989 and a passive, divisive society of post-1989. What explains the displacement of political solidarity with a fragmented political scene? A factor specific to Poland is rooted in the struggle of Solidarity against communist power. The consequences are subsequent attempts to appropriate the values of Solidarność as political capital by competing political voices, leading to contestation about the nature of the country. This normative discourse was evident first in the post-communist divide, between forces stemming from the former communist regime and those affiliated with the opposition. More recently, the saliency of the post-communist division has receded, and a new contested discourse has surfaced among voices coming out of the Solidarity tradition. This rhetoric seeks to define a contrast between a “Solidaristic Poland” dedicated to traditional and Christian values affirming notions of exclusivity and superiority, and a “liberal Poland” dedicated to market and pluralist principles based on competition and individualism. In both political divides, the legacy of Solidarity provides useful political capital to advance distinctive visions of Poland.