Politics and Regionality: Does Region of Residence Affect the State’s Legitimacy?

2020 ◽  
pp. 000276422097504
Author(s):  
Alicia Blanco-González ◽  
Giorgia Miotto ◽  
Francisco Díez-Martín

Even though the Spanish Constitution establishes that Spain is structured into Autonomous Communities and that the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity govern the relationship between the different regions, very often Spanish media publish news about territorial inequality, conflicts, and independency velleity. The objective of this investigation, avoiding digging into the reasons for these claims, is to identify whether the region of residence influences the legitimacy of the Spanish state. The legitimacy of the state is the degree of citizen’s support to the institutions. This support ensures the law compliance, the proper functioning of the country and citizen commitment with the social system. State’s legitimacy is very much linked with the trust on politics and politicians. In the regions characterized by independency issues and conflicts, state’s legitimacy will be limited, and the perception of the state’s meaning and power will be more fragile and instable. The effective and appropriate management of the state and the relevancy of the central politics would be complex in these regions and, finally, regional inequality and fragmentation will increase. To achieve this research objective, we carried out an analysis of the state’s legitimacy of each Spanish region considering the data extracted from the European Social Survey. The results of this research provide valuable information useful for regional political decision making and dig into the reasons why regional conflicts are rooted in the state’s institutions.

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 435-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Shore ◽  
Carolin Rapp ◽  
Daniel Stockemer

Health affects nearly all facets of our lives, including the likelihood of getting involved in politics. Focusing on political efficacy, we zoom in on one potential mechanism as to why people in poor health might, for example, stay at home on Election Day. We first look at the ways in which health is related to both people’s perceptions of their abilities to take part in politics (internal political efficacy) as well as the extent to which they believe policymakers are responsive to citizen needs (external political efficacy). Second, we examine how the social policy context intervenes in the relationship between health and political efficacy. Multilevel models using 2014 and 2016 European Social Survey data on roughly 57,000 respondents nested in 21 European countries reveal complex results: while good health, rather unsurprisingly, fosters internal and external political efficacy, more generous welfare states, though associated with higher levels of political efficacy, are not a panacea for remedying political inequalities stemming from individual health differences.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-141
Author(s):  
Kenneth D. Locke

Abstract. Person–job (or needs–supplies) discrepancy/fit theories posit that job satisfaction depends on work supplying what employees want and thus expect associations between having supervisory power and job satisfaction to be more positive in individuals who value power and in societies that endorse power values and power distance (e.g., respecting/obeying superiors). Using multilevel modeling on 30,683 European Social Survey respondents from 31 countries revealed that overseeing supervisees was positively associated with job satisfaction, and as hypothesized, this association was stronger among individuals with stronger power values and in nations with greater levels of power values or power distance. The results suggest that workplace power can have a meaningful impact on job satisfaction, especially over time in individuals or societies that esteem power.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147490412110146
Author(s):  
Ellen Boeren

This paper borrows insights from the literature on European welfare regimes to analyse the relationship between happiness and participation in adult education. The academic literature and policy discourses on adult education tend to claim that participation in learning is correlated with happiness despite the lack of strong European comparative empirical evidence on this topic. This paper uses data from the latest Wave of the European Social Survey to analyse the happiness perceptions of nearly 20,000 adults between the ages of 25 and 64 who live in 16 European countries (15 European Union countries and the United Kingdom). Results indicate that while adult learners on average tend to be happier than non-learners, this correlation weakens when controlling for determinants of participation and happiness and for the countries in which these adults live. Confirming the importance of welfare regimes, this study found that adults in Finland tend to be happier than those in other countries, regardless of their participation in adult education. Happiness scores were lowest in Bulgaria and Hungary, countries with low participation rates in adult education and with the biggest differences in happiness scores between learners and non-learners. It is argued that the presence of well-structured adult learning provision might be an important characteristic of welfare regimes but that happiness is determined by much more than being an adult learner.


Author(s):  
Dimiter Toshkov

AbstractThe link between age and happiness has been the subject of numerous studies. It is still a matter of controversy whether the relationship is U-shaped, with happiness declining after youth before bouncing back in old age, or not. While the effect of age has been examined conditional on income and other socio-demographic variables, so far, the interactions between age and income have remained insufficiently explored. Using data from the European Social Survey, this article shows that the nature of the relationship between age and happiness varies strongly with different levels of relative income. People in the lowest decile of the income distribution experience a ‘hockey stick’: a deep decline in self-reported happiness until around age 50–55 and a small bounce back in old age. The classic U-curve is found mostly in the middle-income ranks. For people at the top of the income distribution, average happiness does not vary much with age. These results demonstrate the important role of income in moderating the relationship between age and happiness.


2020 ◽  
pp. 31-35
Author(s):  
Maria Kudryavtseva

The article examines the relationship between the social policy of the state and the Institute of social work. Some foreign and domestic approaches to defi ning the essence of social work as a specifi c type of activity are presented. It is noted that at a specifi c historical stage, the prevailing directions of social work, models of social assistance and support are determined by the socio-economic situation in the country, the level of social development, and the socio-cultural context. It is emphasized that in the conditions of modern reality, there is a need to develop the Institute of social work and realize its potential.


Author(s):  
Tom W. Smith

This chapter examines trends in institutional confidence measured by the General Social Survey between 1973 and 2006. It begins by considering the construct of institutional confidence and describing the items and scales used to measure it. After presenting overall levels of confidence in 13 institutions during this period, it examines trends in general confidence scales and in individual institutions. Cohort analysis helps to illuminate these trends. The chapter next investigates correlates of institutional confidence, including experiences with specific institutions, party-in-power effects, education, misanthropy, opinionation, and a general demographic model. It briefly considers the relationship between institutional confidence and support for government programs and political matters. It closes by assessing the state and role of institutional confidence in contemporary society, and both general and event-driven models of trends in confidence.


Competition ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 48-60
Author(s):  
Patrik Aspers

This chapter looks at competition, asking how it comes about and how it develops, with a focus on mutual adjustment. Mutual adjustment covers the social process due to decisions that actors make for themselves and not for others. Though all actual competition involves mutual adjustment, the focus here is on how a state of competition arises as a consequence of actors who mutually adjust to one another. Competition is seen as an unintended consequence created by actors who may have different desires and intentions and who are observing, adjusting, mimicking, and relating in different ways to what others are doing. The chapter analyses the relationship between mutual adjustment and organized competition and offers empirical examples of the state of competition due to mutual adjustment.


Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Fatke

Inequality poses one of the biggest challenges of our time. It is not self-correcting in the sense that citizens demand more redistributive measures in light of rising inequality, which recent studies suggest may be due to the fact that citizens’ perceptions of inequality diverge from objective levels. Moreover, it is not the latter, but the former, which are related to preferences conducive to redistribution. However, the nascent literature on inequality perceptions has, so far, not accounted for the role of subjective position in society. The paper advances the argument that the relationship between inequality perceptions and preferences towards redistribution is conditional on the subjective position of respondents. To that end, I analyze comprehensive survey data on inequality perceptions from the social inequality module of the International Social Survey Programme (1992, 1999, and 2009). Results show that inequality perceptions are associated with preferences conducive to redistribution particularly among those perceive to be at the top of the social ladder. Gaining a better understanding of inequality perceptions contributes to comprehending the absence self-correcting inequality.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Makai ◽  
Viktória Prémusz ◽  
Kata Füge ◽  
Mária Figler ◽  
Kinga Lampek

Abstract In this study we examined the health of the ageing population of East-Central Europe. Data derived from the 6th round of the European Social Survey. The aim of our research was to examine the most important factors that determine ageing people’s health status. We paid particular attention to the social ties of our target group.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 471-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Engzell ◽  
Mathieu Ichou

Immigrants experience an ambiguous social position: on the one hand, they tend to be positively selected on resources from the origin country; on the other, they often occupy the lower rungs of the status ladder in receiving countries. This study explores the implications of this ambiguity for two important individual outcomes: subjective social status and perceived financial situation. We study the diverse sample of immigrants in the European Social Survey and use the fact that, due to country differences in educational distributions, a given education level can entail a very different rank in the sending and receiving countries. We document a robust relationship whereby immigrants who ranked higher in the origin than in the destination country see themselves as being comparatively worse off. This finding suggests that the social position before migration provides an important reference point by which immigrants judge their success in the new country.


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