The World Values Survey in Great Britain: Examining Values Polarisation in Britain and the World

Values are the basic principles that inform the judgements we make about what is important in life. They are reflected in our attitudes, judgements, standards of behaviour and determine what we care about. Since 1981, the World Values Survey (WVS) has tracked the evolution of values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour on topics that range from cultural identity, migration, interpersonal trust, empathy and human tolerance to media usage, political interest and views on science, technology and environmental protection. Today, WVS is one of the largest and most used social surveys in the world. Its global coverage, capturing the views of almost 400,000 people in over 110 countries, has enabled the study of interactions between different values across diverse national circumstances and to monitor how values are changing.

WVS fieldwork is conducted in waves every five years. Great Britain has participated in two waves, conducting interviews in 1998 and 2005. Since then, the nation has experienced profound change, from the effects of the financial crisis through to the political volatility following the vote to leave the EU. Understanding whether underlying values within Britain, and between Britain and other nations, have grown apart or come together matters. We are told that the population is split along a variety of fault lines, be it by how we voted in the EU referendum, where we live, our age or our level of education. Whether these differences are real or imagined, fixed or shifting, is of immense consequence. Participating in Wave 7 of WVS offers a timely opportunity to explore where coherent or fractured identities have formed, how deeply and whether these trends are distinctive to other countries.

Conducting fieldwork in May 2020, this grant will not only generate a high-quality data resource at a decisive point in the nation's history, soon after the UK intends to leave the EU; the project will conduct new analyses that test whether values, attitudes and beliefs in Britain and elsewhere are polarising, to help shape policy decisions and nuance public discussion about division in Britain against a global context.

The project's objectives have four core applications and benefits:

1. Thousands of researchers use WVS data as a basis for their work, along with governments, journalists, international agencies and others. Our primary objective is to ensure that fieldwork for Great Britain is conducted in 2020 to generate a high-quality data resource that can be accessed and reused, without restriction, by users around the world.

2. Research into division in Britain's values, attitudes and beliefs has largely been issue specific or focused on identities formed around Brexit. The broad subject and country coverage of WVS presents the opportunity to apply a cross-disciplinary, globally-comparative lens to the topic of polarisation, furthering understanding of how individually divisive issues intersect, inform identity and become mutually reinforcing.

3. Grouping populations by their values or morals can reveal a fuller spectrum between the attention-grabbing extremities of political identity. We will explore a range of segmentations that provide alternative models for groupings in the British population based on morals or values, moving beyond divisive models such as Leave/Remain, Somewhere/Anywhere, Open/Closed. To support this aim, we will add a set of questions on Moral Foundations Theory.

4. There is clear concern within UK government about growing division in society; yet understanding of where the most urgent issues lie is poorly evidenced and rarely considered against the global context. Our fourth objective, to build consensus around where diverging values have implications for UK policy, will deliver a clear benefit to policymakers. Drawing on input from subject and policy experts, we will collaboratively develop recommendations to help improve outcomes around the most divisive or unifying policy areas.

We have identified three objectives for our Impact and Engagement strategy, which are described in more detail in the Pathways to Impact:

1. To raise awareness and encourage reuse of WVS and EVS datasets;
2. To collaboratively identify the challenge that polarisation presents for UK policy and to support policy change that responds to divisions, continuity and convergence in the population's values;
3. To contribute to a more nuanced public understanding and debate around polarisation in Britain.

In order to deliver on these objectives we will work with three sets of stakeholders/beneficiaries:

1. Existing and new WVS users. Thousands of people around the world use WVS as a basis for their work, from academics and students working across a huge range of disciplinary contexts, to governments, journalists, international agencies such as the World Bank (World Bank Group, 2018; World Bank Group, 2016), the UN (UNESCWA, 2018; UN, DESA, 2016) and the World Health Organization (WHO, 2013), and a range of others. Moreover, there is clear demand from the UK government for Britain to rejoin the WVS, with expressions of interest from the Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Cabinet Office (see Case for Support). We will engage with existing and new WVS users through our series of events and policy reports, which will present accessible summaries of the trends and interpretation of the data, alongside recommendations developed collaboratively as part of the Policy Labs (see point 2. and Pathways to Impact).

2. UK policymakers, particularly those in national and local Government with a Social Policy remit. There is clear concern within the UK government about growing division in society; however, there remains little consensus on the specific nature or extent of division or convergence - be it within Britain, or between Britain and other nations and cross-national blocs (not only the EU, but also the Commonwealth and traditional Anglo-Saxon allies). A core impact of this project will be to build a more nuanced and data-driven political debate about shifts in the underlying values of different nations, and its implications for policymaking. Given the potential breadth of issues and policy areas that may interact to contribute to polarisation, we will convene a broad range of subject experts, policy specialists and public servants in our series of Policy Labs, which will focus on recent shifts in values (RQ1), generational variance (RQ2) and new segmentation approaches (RQ4), with an international focus (RQ3) running through each. These groups will fundamentally influence the design and direction of the project's findings, providing a vehicle to co-develop actionable recommendations that, in the longer term, we see as giving rise to policies that are responsive to the divisions and common ground in the values of the population. Our ability to execute and truly embed our recommendations within government will be supported by a partnership with the Behavioural Insights Team, who will support the dissemination of findings through its cross-government policy networks.

3. Media. Traditional news media and social media can play a reinforcing role in the perception of polarisation (Curran, Gaber & Petley, 2019; Sunstein, 2017; Fiorina, 2010). In response, we aim to build a close collaborative partnership with a media partner to help build a more nuanced public discussion around, and understanding of, polarisation. We aim to formalise a relationship with a media partner for the duration of the research and have already begun discussions with the Senior Commissioning Editor of the BBC World Service. This partnership will enable us to co-create a stream of content that offers a more balanced representation of how the population is growing together and apart, with the view to shifting the tone of the prevailing narrative.