The 2008 Global Financial Crisis significantly disrupted economies across the world, presenting a unique opportunity to examine how economic shocks influence the cultural values expressed by governments. This thesis investigates whether and how the crisis reshaped governmental value expression by analyzing political speeches from four European countries—Spain and Italy (treatment group) and Germany and the Netherlands (control group)—from 2006 to 2010. Leveraging Schwartz’s theory of basic human values and a novel OpenAI GPT-4o-based pipeline for computational value extraction, I quantify the relative emphasis placed on ten value dimensions within each speech. Employing a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) framework, the study isolates the causal impact of the crisis on governmental value orientation. Findings reveal that, contrary to theories predicting authoritarian or dominance-oriented reactions, crisis-affected governments significantly increased their emphasis on benevolence-oriented values. These results are robust across multiple specifications, placebo tests, and sensitivity analyses, including data sampling adjustments. This study contributes methodologically to value quantification using large language models, and theoretically to our understanding of how elite political discourse adapts toeconomic upheaval by signaling solidarity and moral responsiveness.