Relationship between Instantiations of Basic Human Values and Political Participation among Moscow Students

This study explores the relationship between basic human value instantiations and political participation of Moscow students. The purpose of our work is to determine how value-based instantiations are related to political participation and to assess whether they moderate the relationship between the two concepts. Political participation scale is developed on the basis of the ESS scale, and instantiations of basic human values are based on the research of P. Hanel, G. Maio, and S. Schwartz. For this purpose, an online survey of Moscow full-time undergraduate students (N = 381) has been carried out. In our paper we try to find correlations between the concepts, as well as to check the moderation effect by modeling interactions in a regression. Thus, we will be able to find the connection between value instantiations and political participation. We assume that the inclusion of political instantiations in the model has a significant effect: those who consider political instantiations more typical of a value will be more strongly associated with political participation as the value increases. Including the effect of interaction in regression models has shown a significant effect only for a few combinations of value-political instantiation. Positive interaction effects were found for Tradition values (beta1 = 0.585, beta2 = 0.580, p-value < 0.05), Conformity (beta1 = 0.177, p-value < 0. 01; beta2 = 0.172, p-value < 0.01; beta3 = 0.249, p-value < 0.001) and Identity (beta1 = 0.202, beta2 = 0.202, beta3 = 0.195, p < 0.05) and their respective instantiations. Despite the small R2 of obtained models, our findings support the hypothesis about the moderator role of instantiations in the values-political participation relation. The absence of a significant effect of moderation among the rest of the instantiations may indicate either a genuinely weak connection of these concepts or the need to refine the instrument and apply a wider range of analysis methods. The absence of a link in this study can be justified either by a real disconnection of these concepts or by an inappropriate instrument. Further experiments with the scale of measurement of instantiations, tuning in the instrument, and testing on other samples can help develop this relatively new concept and shed light on the value determinants of political participation. This study was the first step in finding the link between political participation and the concept of value instantiations.