Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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Substantive studies using cross-national data |
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| Chair | Mr Dominik Becker (Technical University of Dortmund) |
A spate of work has demonstrated a significance of social group asymmetries in the claim of a common identity. Yet, their impact on collective European identity construction is still relatively unstudied. Employing a cross-national comparison, this study investigates the convergence of identity contents. Specifically, we explore sub-group's manifestation of its identity content (identity markers), and their distribution on three levels of identification: National, European, and Ideal-European. We examine the evidence for three explanations we discern from the literature: central/peripheral group position, relative in-group prototypicality and historical context (i.e., enlargement of the European Union). In line with Group Position Model (Blumer, 1958; Bobo & Tuan, 2006), we assumed that national subgroups that benefit from higher social status would be more likely to project their national markers onto the superordinate category than those with a lower status respectively. Yet we propose an inverse pattern for the construction of an idealized Europe (Ideal-Europe). We assumed that groups with lower status would be more likely to apply their national markers by constructing Ideal-Europe. The authors test these hypotheses on 7 countries using multilevel analysis. The authors find strong evidence that perception of in-group status affects the identification with an inclusive category. In general, our findings formalize the idea that attachment to a common Europeanness is context-bounded and illustrate that identification process is affected by groups' asymmetries. Furthermore, our findings highlight the need for implementing large-scale strategies when performing a cross-national comparative research.
The data of the European sociological research and ISSP show that right-wing ideology becames more popular in a number of European countries. Far-right party Svoboda, espousing racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views on the parliamentary elections in Ukraine 2012 received 10.44% and for the first time was held in the Parliament (in the previous elections of 2007, it received only 0.76% of the votes). This has caused concern of a large number of citizens of Ukraine and the European Parliament. Whether far-right ideology has such strong support in Ukraine or there were other reasons for this success? The success of far-right party Svoboda at the 2012 Parliamentary Election in Ukraine is evaluated in socio-political and socio-economical context. In this study, we use regression modeling approach with two levels: regional and personal. The regional-level regression used aggregated data of official statistics about well-being and educational status, ethno-linguistic compositions, electoral history, etc. of the main administrative regions of Ukraine. On the personal-level, we use national population poll data about the basic social and political values and attitudes. As a result, we can compare the influence of right-wing ideology popularity itself and "protest" voting on the growing support of the right party. The situation in Ukraine will be compared with the situation in other European countries using the data of the EES and the ISSP.
This paper investigates the relationship between ingroup and outgroup trust. Delhey and Welzel demonstrated positive effect of ingroup trust and human empowerment on trust in outgroup. Using the 5th wave of the "World Values Survey" they created additional indexes of ingroup trust (family, neighbors, known people) and outgroup trust (unknown people, people of another nationality and religion). This procedure equalizes ingroup/outgroup and known/unknown dimensions. Trust indicators should be disaggregated, and the impact of human empowerment should be retested with new measures.
Our study represents several insights. First, trust in unknown people is almost impossible without trust in outgroup while trust in people of another nationality and religion can exist without trust in strangers. Second, trust in neighbors is an ambiguous indicator. It correlates at the same level with known and unknown people. Third, trust in family has low variation and correlates weakly with all items from outgroup trust index. Fourth, to avoid misinterpretation it is better to incorporate known/unknown measures into investigation. Fifth, at the country-level human empowerment has non-linear relationship with trust in known and trust in unknown people, as well. The first stage of human empowerment process leads to the decline of trust in strangers while trust in the familiar people remains stable. The second stage brings the rise of all trust types. Sixth, with respect to other determinants trust in known people keeps its positive impact on trust in strangers. It is stronger in countries with lower level of human empowerment.