(Post) materialist value orientations and global attitudes towards women in politics: a multi-wave cross-sectional analysis

While prior research has extensively examined factors shaping attitudes towards women’s political leadership, empirical evidence on how broader cultural value shifts shape citizens attitudes across diverse democratic contexts remains limited. Using World Values Survey data, this study employs a three-level multilevel logistic regression models to assess how individual post-materialist values interact with national democratic quality and women’s parliamentary representation to shape citizens attitudes towards in women political leadership. Results show that post-materialist values are strongly associated with support for women’s political leadership, especially in countries with higher democratic quality and greater women’s representation. This suggests that cultural value shift is conditioned by institutional reinforcement to produce egalitarian political attitudes. These findings extend value change theory and feminist institutionalism by demonstrating how culture and institutions jointly condition gender equality in political life, inviting deeper engagement with post-materialism in global gender politics.