21 July 2026
Major new project to investigate how values are shifting across Europe and beyond
The Policy Institute has been awarded funding to run the next wave of the European Values Study in the UK, in the same year as we’re also delivering the the World Values Survey
In an increasingly uncertain and divided world, it’s vital to understand how values are changing, in the UK and globally.
That’s why we’re delighted the Policy Institute has been awarded funding to run the next wave of the European Values Study (EVS) in the UK, in partnership with City St George’s, University of London.
Covering nearly all countries in Europe, the EVS has been running for 45 years capturing how attitudes, values and beliefs are evolving across the continent, over the long term. It is now approaching its sixth round of data collection in 2026.
We will be running the EVS in the same year as the World Values Survey (WVS), which we are also delivering. This is the first time that both major studies have been delivered by the same academic team in the UK, in the same year.
In practice, this means double the sample, of around 5,500 respondents, for key questions that are repeated across both studies, allowing more scope for analysis.
The EVS also asks more in-depth questions on living standards, social security, attitudes to work, minority rights, and national and European identities, and enhanced coverage on topics such as climate change, gender equality, immigration, religion and political identity.
We’ll be boosting samples in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, following the approach taken in WVS, for a more granular view of how attitudes, values and beliefs are changing across all four nations of the UK, and enabling each country to be understood in an international context.
The UK EVS team will be led by Dr Kirstie Hewlett, supported by Professor Bobby Duffy and Tim Hanson. We will be working closely with partners from the Social Change Initiative, Scottish Government, and PolicyWISE at the Open University, and are very grateful to the ESRC for funding these major sources of evidence on values shifts at such a key time.
We will be running a major programme of engagement with the findings from both WVS and EVS – and what they tell us about how the UK is changing – starting later this year, with new results coming out early in 2027.
If you have any questions or would like to know more about the study or connect with our work on it, you can get in touch with the team at uk-values@kcl.ac.uk.
In this story
Director
Senior Research Fellow