Values in politics: Exploring alignment between value salience in political texts, value importance in representative population samples, and political engagement

Abstract Values are central to human behavior and politics; however, we do not know much about which values are expressed in political texts and how these values align with those that are important to the larger population and those that relate to political engagement. We report the largest human‐based annotation of value expression in political texts to date (2678 political texts across 9 languages, coded by 66 experts in values research). We found that the most salient values in political texts were security and power, and the least salient were tradition and hedonism. This pattern was highly consistent across languages. However, the salience of values in political texts did not converge with either the relative importance of personal values in nationally representative samples ( N = 156,623) or the pattern of relations of personal values with political engagement. We discuss possible sources and consequences of this misalignment between values expressed in political discourse, personal value priorities, and those values that are associated with political engagement.