Abstract.In this article we try to disentangle the constraints between traditional lines of political polarization (left‐right placement) and newer distinctions (materialist/postmaterialist values) among mass publics. It is shown that voting or party preference is most clearly related to the left‐right placement of the respondents. However, this placement is directly and strongly dependent on the materialist/postmaterialist orientation, while background variables like education, income and age are linked to voting via this value orientation. The materialist/postmaterialist orientation appears to be the present‐day interpretation of the dominant political conflict in advanced industrial society. Although alignments and orientations count for a substantive part of the variance in voting, the power of these models to predict the actual vote of people turns out to be rather