Exclusionary Contexts Frustrate Cultural Integration: Migrant Acculturation Into Support for Gender Equality in the Labor Market in Western Europe

Countering linear acculturation theories, the adoption of Western European gender customs over time differs across migrant groups. This diversity implies that acculturation into support for gender equality is context dependent. However, little quantitative scholarship has identified what sort of contexts strengthen or impede acculturation. This article investigates one source of context-dependent acculturation: exclusionary contexts. I build and test a context-dependent exclusions framework that proposes that contexts that exclude non-Western migrants hamper their acculturation into support for gender equality in the labor market in Western Europe. Empirically, I synchronize European Social Survey, European Values Study, and Eurislam data on over 11,000 non-Western migrants in Western Europe. Cross-classified models show that non-Western migrants’ support for labor-market gender equality is, indeed, lower in exclusionary contexts, for instance, in destinations with stronger anti-migrant sentiments. Pivotally, the impact of destinations’ gender customs on migrants’ gender values differs across destination, origin, and community contexts. For instance, in destinations with stronger populist right-wing parties, migrants internalize destinations’ gender equality less. Altogether, non-Western migrants’ acculturation into support for labor-market gender equality is highly dependent on contextual exclusions, which means that populist claims about non-Western migrants’ universal lack of acculturation into support for gender equality should be viewed cautiously.

Unmet Aspirations and Urban Malaise

This article analyses the gap between human aspirations concerning self-enhancement and corresponding outcomes in ten western European countries. Utilizing individual data for 14,300 respondents from the European Social Survey, four self-enhancement gap metrics are created: (1) the Ambition gap; (2) the Success gap; (3) the Wealth gap; and (4) the Authority gap. The findings suggest that subjective well-being (SWB) appears to be higher in rural than in urban communities. One reason for lower SWB among urban residents relates to their higher aspirations in certain areas of life. However, urban areas are apparently able to meet the financial expectations of their inhabitants far better than rural areas are, whereas an unmet craving for, e.g., success in rural areas appears not to affect SWB at all. Overall, there is a strong association between unmet aspirations and lower satisfaction with life. The added value of this paper is that it goes beyond existing explanations of the reasons behind urban malaise in developed economies.

Sustainable Development and Religion. A European Perspective

Religion is an important factor associated with sustainable development. Based on the data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) – Religion IV, we analysed religiosity in 20 European countries, taking into account declarations of religiosity, frequency of religious practices, religious beliefs, and attitudes towards members of other religious groups and non-believers. We have also examined how declarations of religiosity have changed since 1991 and compared the results with the ones from the European Social Survey.

Schwartz’s Human Values and the Care for Nature in Croatia and Five Other Central European Countries Based on ESS Data from Round 4 (2008) and Round 9 (2018)

This paper examines the care for nature in Croatia based on the European Social Survey (ESS) data from Round 4 (2008) and Round 9 (2018) over time and cross-nationally, in comparison with five other Central European (CE) countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia). We correlate the item about the care for nature with Schwartz’s Human Values Scale (HVS), as adapted for the ESS, to investigate whether values as defined by Schwartz serve as good predictors of the care for nature in selected CE countries. We also look at the correlation with respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics. Our analysis reveals that, while there are similarities regarding environmental attitudes and values among CE countries, there are also some individual differences. Croatia shows the strongest increase in the support for the care for nature over the 10-year period, and both Croatia and Slovenia score the highest on the care for nature in 2018. Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic show an overall stagnation in the results, while Hungary exhibits a significant decrease between 2008 and 2018. Our research in CE countries confirms that Schwartz’s HVS can be predictive of pro-environmentalism. However, while the findings for the higher-order value of Self-transcendence are in line with existing literature, the result suggesting that Conservatism is also a moderately good predictor of the care for nature is somewhat surprising. We posit that the reason could lie in the difference between collectivist vs. individualist value types, which provides a new dimension for the interpretation of environmental attitudes in these countries.

Assessing Socioeconomic Inequality in Self-Rated Health in Four ex-Yugoslav Countries

There has been a growing academic interest in explaining the well-established association between socioeconomic status and health. Among the various proposed mechanisms and pathways, social capital has been recognised as a potentially important antecedent of socioeconomic inequalities in health. However, these interrelationships remain relatively unexplored within the countries of former Yugoslavia. Therefore, this article aims to fill the gap in the literature by exploring the role of individual-level social capital in the relationship between socioeconomic status and self-rated health in four ex-Yugoslav countries. The present study is based on the data from the ninth round of the European Social Survey (2018). The author analysed the data of participants aged 25 and over from Croatia (N = 1534), Montenegro (N = 1002), Serbia (N = 1720) and Slovenia (N = 1149). In order to test the target associations, sequential multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed. The results show that occupational social class and several social capital indicators are associated with self-rated health, although independently of each other. Across all countries, unskilled and skilled manual workers and long-term unemployed individuals were more likely to report poor health compared to non-manual workers, with the exception of Montenegrin skilled manual workers and the long-term unemployed participants from Slovenia. Moreover, despite some cross-country differences in the relationship between individual levels of social capital and self-rated health, social participation was associated with self-rated health across all countries. These findings highlight the importance of encouraging social participation within these countries, which can lead to health benefits through behavioural and psychosocial mechanisms.

Professional Productivity and Subjective Well-Being

Despite аn extensive research on subjective well-being conducted over the past decades, there remains uncertainty about whether happier workers are actually more productive. The aim of the study was to analyze the causal relationships between subjective well-being and job performance using employees of leading Russian universities as a case study. The article presents the analysis of subjective well-being of scientific-pedagogical employees in modern universities and indicators of their performance based on empirical research materials. The construct of subjective well-being assessment was based on the existing theoretical models by E. Diener, D. Kahneman, R. Inglehardt. The research program included the assessment of indicators of general perception of happiness, productivity, life satisfaction, job satisfaction indicators by questionnaire survey. For the validity of measurements, the research tools included proven methods and scales: Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale, questions from studies of subjective well-being and quality of life in the European Social Survey (ESS), WCIOM surveys. In this study, statistical methods such as correlation analysis, Pearson's Chi-square test of agreement, and least squares regression analysis (LSR) were used to analyze the relationships between the level of subjective well-being and the level of scientific productivity. The results of the present study statistically proved a significant positive correlation between the level of subjective well-being and scientific productivity of higher education employees. These data are a signal to revise the views on faculty motivation towards the formation of effective social responsibility, which includes, among other things, the development and implementation of programmes to improve the well-being of their staff.

Happy Cultures? A Multilevel Model of Well-Being with Individual and Contextual Human Values

Despite the abundant literature in Happiness Science, no paper to date has studied the joint effects of human values on subjective well-being at individual and contextual level. Using European Social Survey data for life satisfaction and Salomon H. Schwartz’s scale for human values with four and ten dimensions, this paper presents novel evidence on the direct effects of individual, regional, and national human values, utilizing two different ways of building cultural indicators of human values. We show that regional factors explain approximately 2% of the dispersion of individual life satisfaction, whereas national factors explain around 12%. The results on the effects of individual human values support Sortheix and Schwartz’s hypothesis, with a significant difference: Individual Conformity has a positive impact on well-being, not the negative sign Sortheix and Schwartz predict for Conservation values. We also find positive direct cultural effects for Benevolence and Conformity and negative effects for Tradition. Additionally, we propose a research agenda for human values and contextual effects on well-being studies.

The Social Status of the elderly from a Comparative Perspective: distinctions of Post-communist Countries

Social status reflects the hierarchical position of social groups within society, their prestige as perceived by members of their society. The existing literature shows that age groups differ in their status considerably across countries, and that their status is linked to socio-economic modernization. This study investigates the determinants of elderly people’s status in post-communist countries in comparison to other countries. Using two large international datasets — from the World Values Survey (58 countries) and European Social Survey (29 countries) — as well as multilevel regressions, we found that elderly people in post-communist countries were at the bottom of the status hierarchy. Compared to other regions of the world, this low status was only in part explained by country modernization level, implying that some other factors may have had an effect. Moreover, only in postcommunist countries the perceived status of older people decreased with respondent’s age. We suggest that the low status of older people in post-communist countries was caused by the social and economic transformations that followed the fall of the communist regime — which led to the older generation losing human capital — and then exacerbated by the ageist legacy of the Soviet industrialist ideology. Finally, we insist that the very low status of older people is a problem of society as a whole rather than this particular age group.

What Shapes Attitudes Toward Homosexuality among European Muslims? The Role of Religiosity and Destination Hostility

Muslim migrants and their descendants in Western Europe have consistently been shown to hold more negative attitudes toward homosexuality, the more religious they are. In this article, we go beyond this mono-dimensional view of religiosity and develop a theoretical framework that combines (a) the role of different dimensions of religiosity in anchoring cultural attitudes and (b) the potential impact of destination hostility and discrimination on the retention of cultural attitudes toward homosexuality among Muslim migrants in Western Europe. For the analysis, we use eight rounds of the European Social Survey, enriched with country-level data. Findings indicate that Muslim migrants’ mosque attendance, as a dimension of religiosity, has the negative effect that was expected. Particularly, Muslims who grew up in Western Europe are negative about homosexuality if they attended mosque regularly, whereas among first-generation Muslim migrants, origin-country norms are a strong predictor of attitudes toward homosexuality. In addition, we find that perceived group discrimination drives the maintenance of negative attitudes toward homosexuality, especially among mosque attendees. These results imply that the development of more liberal attitudes among European Muslims is held back by a combination of socialization in conservative religious communities and hostility from host-country populations.

Investigating the Relation of Functioning as A Determinant of Wellbeing to Political and Social Trust in Three Balkan Countries

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.