scholarly journals Mind This Gap, Too: Political Orientations of People with Disabilities in Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 791-818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Reher

Abstract People with disabilities constitute one of the largest minority groups in Europe, and yet our knowledge about how they relate to the political system remains limited. In addition to facing practical barriers such as inaccessible campaign material and polling stations, they often have fewer resources that facilitate and promote confidence and engagement in politics. Moreover, experiences of discrimination and low numbers of politicians with disabilities can generate feelings of disempowerment. Using European Social Survey data from 30 countries from 2002 to 2015, this study shows that people with disabilities have lower levels of internal and external efficacy, political trust and interest, and electoral participation. The disparities in internal efficacy and political interest disappear when accounting for education, income, employment, and social contact. Meanwhile, significant gaps in external efficacy, political trust, and turnout remain to be explained. Perceptions of discrimination strengthen the internal efficacy and political interest of citizens with disabilities but further decrease their external efficacy, political trust, and turnout. The study sheds light on a frequently overlooked dimension of political inequality, provides insights on several contributing factors, and highlights where further research is needed.

Author(s):  
Marc Hooghe ◽  
Anna Kern

This chapter evaluates the claim that the decline of legitimacy is due to a decline of social capital. The idea that voluntary associations play an important role in establishing social cohesion and political support is a traditional insight in the field of political sociology. The basic assumption is that voluntary associations function as a training ground for democracy, where citizens involved acquire democratic norms and skills that they subsequently apply in their relation with the political system. If this argument is correct, political support should be at least partly influenced by citizens’ participation in civil society organizations. Using European Social Survey data from 2006 and 2012 the authors demonstrate that there is a clear and significant correlation between social involvement on the one hand and satisfaction with the working of democracy and political trust on the other, which largely survives the introduction of a range of control variables.


Sociologija ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-439
Author(s):  
Milos Besic

In this paper, we compare the latent construct measurement of political and interpersonal trust in two researches: the European Values Study and the European Social Survey. The main goal was to estimate the validity of measuring the respective concepts. In order to achieve this goal, we conducted a number of Principal Component Analyses and Confirmatory Factor Analyses. Additionally, we used multilevel regression modelling to test and compare the effect of socio-demographic variables on political and interpersonal trust in both researches. We identified that socio-demographic predictors had a similar effect on both types of trust. The paper is complemented with descriptive data that portray the differences among countries when it comes to interpersonal and political trust.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schnaudt ◽  
Caroline Hahn ◽  
Elias Heppner

Previous research underlines that a political system's adherence to principles of distributive and procedural justice stimulates citizens' political trust. Yet, most of what is known about the relationship between justice and political trust is derived from macro-level indicators of distributive and procedural justice, merely presuming that citizens connect a political system's adherence to justice principles to their trust in political authorities and institutions. Accordingly, we still lack a clear understanding of whether and how individual perceptions and evaluations of distributive and procedural justice influence citizens' political trust and how their impact might be conditioned by a political system's overall adherence to principles of justice. In addition, previous research has implicitly assumed that the link between justice principles and political trust operates identically for all major political authorities and institutions, disregarding the possibility that citizens evaluate representative and regulative authorities and institutions on the basis of different justice criteria. Against this background, the aims of the present study are (1) to investigate the impact of individual evaluations of distributive and procedural justice on citizens' political trust, (2) to analyze to what extent the effects of justice evaluations on political trust depend on political systems' overall adherence to principles of distributive and procedural justice, and (3) to assess whether and in which ways the influence of justice evaluations differs for trust in representative and regulative authorities and institutions. Our empirical analysis covering more than 30,000 respondents from 27 European countries based on data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project demonstrates that (1) more positive evaluations of distributive and procedural justice foster citizens' political trust, that (2) the impact of justice evaluations on political trust is amplified in political systems in which the overall adherence to justice principles is compromised, and that (3) different facets of distributive and procedural justice evaluations exert varying effects on citizens' trust in representative as compared to regulative authorities and institutions. These findings entail important implications with regard to the relation between justice and political trust and the general viability of modern democratic systems.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Jaap van Slageren ◽  
Frank van Tubergen

Abstract This study compares generalised trust between second-generation Muslim and non- Muslim migrant groups in Europe, and examines the effect on trust of discrimination and cultural transmission. Analysis of data from the European Social Survey of 4,687 respondents in 32 European countries shows that second-generation Muslim groups have lower levels of trust than second-generation non-Muslim minority groups. The findings provide no evidence that Muslims’ lower levels of trust are due to discrimination and exclusion. Rather, results indicate that the differences are due to cultural transmission: Muslim groups originate more often from low-trust societies, and generalised trust is transmitted from one generation to the next.


Author(s):  
Danying Li ◽  
Miguel R. Ramos ◽  
Matthew R. Bennett ◽  
Douglas S. Massey ◽  
Miles Hewstone

Immigration is increasing around the world. Academic work suggests that increasing immigration reduces social cohesion and subjective well-being, but these studies mainly focused on white majority populations. Using the 2002 to 2014 European Social Survey, we analyze data from 5,149 ethnic minority respondents living in twenty-four European countries. We examine the association between immigration and respondents’ well-being, mediated by two critical cognitive mechanisms: perceived discrimination and generalized trust. We find that in the short term, immigration is associated with greater perceived discrimination, which in turn is associated with lower trust and well-being. Over the longer term, though, immigration is associated with lower perceived discrimination from ethnic minorities, yielding greater generalized trust and perceived well-being.


Author(s):  
John F. Helliwell ◽  
Haifang Huang ◽  
Shun Wang

Data from three large international surveys—the Gallup World Poll, the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey—are used to estimate income-equivalent values for social trust, with a likely lower bound equivalent to a doubling of household income. Second, the more detailed and precisely measured trust data in the European Social Survey (ESS) are used to compare the effects of different types of social and political trust. While social trust and trust in police are most important, there are significant additional benefits from trust in three aspects of the institutional environment: the legal system, parliament and politicians. The total well-being value of a trustworthy environment is estimated to be larger than that flowing from social trust alone. Third, the ESS data show that being subject to discrimination, ill-health or unemployment is much less damaging to those living in trustworthy environments. These resilience-increasing features of social trust hence lessen well-being inequality by channeling the largest benefits to those at the low end of the well-being distribution.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giedo Jansen

Abstract It is often held that the self-employed are an economically conservative, political right-wing class. Previous studies, however, have primarily dealt with self-employed workers as a relatively monolithic social class with shared interests as entrepreneurs and (potential) employers. But, with its recent rise, self-employment has developed into a heterogeneous employment type, with a growing number of dependent and precarious self-employed. In this article, the political preferences of people in self-employment are compared to the preferences of employees on temporary contracts. In doing so, hypotheses are tested from both classic theories on class voting, as well as theories on job precariousness and labor market vulnerabilities. For this purpose, European Social Survey Round 4 (ESS-4) data on eight West European countries are analyzed. The findings suggest that particular segments of self-employment share the characteristics of other forms of ‘atypical’ work, not only with respect to labor market insecurities, but also regarding the political orientations associated with such insecurities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (11/12) ◽  
pp. 1337-1355
Author(s):  
Jukka Sivonen

PurposeThis study examines how the effects of three predictors, namely left–right political orientation, generalized trust and political trust, on fossil fuel taxation attitudes vary between post-communist and other European countries.Design/methodology/approachBy using European Social Survey (ESS) Round 8 data and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, this paper studied the effects of the hypothesized predictors on fossil fuel taxation attitudes across post-communist and other European countries. The countries were analyzed both in group and individually.FindingsThe results showed that stronger left-wing orientation, higher generalized trust and higher political trust predict more support for fossil fuel taxation at the country group level in both post-communist and other Europe. However, the effects were generally speaking less consistent and significant in the countries of the post-communist Europe. By and large, the effect of political trust was the most significant and universal.Originality/valueThe findings contribute to the understanding how left–right political orientation and generalized trust have somewhat distinct effects on fossil fuel taxation attitudes in different European country contexts, while the effect of political trust is more universal across the continent.


2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren McLaren

A previously overlooked explanation for varying individual levels of political trust is concern about immigration. This article examines the effect of concern about immigration on political trust in Britain, where levels of opposition to immigration have remained high since the 1960s and yet the implications of such opposition are still unclear. Using the pre-election and post-election panel component of the 2005 British Election Study and the 2002–03 European Social Survey, the author shows, after controlling for other predictors of trust in politics, that concerns about the impact of immigration significantly affect political trust. In addition, in 2005 the perception that government had not handled the issue of immigration effectively also significantly affected political trust, with both linear and interactive effects.


2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-231

The measurement of wellbeing, political trust in institutions and social trust provide important indicators of the welfare of nations, political legitimacy and the stability of democratic political systems, and a country’s political culture, respectively. In this paper, the relation of functioning as a determinant of wellbeing to political and social trust was investigated using 2012 European Social Survey (ESS) datasets of three Balkan countries: Albania, Bulgaria and Kosovo. This involves first examining the structure of functioning and assess the psychometric properties of the resulting scale (or subscales). Preliminary tests explored the statistically significant relations of functioning to the political and social trust items as well as the socio-demographic variables and the left/right self-placement scale. Only in the case of the Bulgarian dataset, EFA and CFA resulted in a unidimensional valid and reliable scale measuring functioning scale comprised of all the initial eight items. Although the analysis did not result in the same structure of functioning for the three Balkan countries, it did provide a reliable and valid scale in the cases of Bulgaria and Kosovo. This work could be extended to cover all participating countries of this Round of the ESS.


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