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Nothing puzzles sociologists of religion more than the reasons and the patterns behind religious change. In the literature on secularization processes, it is broadly accepted that ongoing modernization has undermined many of the pillars of institutional religions, leading to widespread religious decline. While a considerable body of research investigates the "why(s)" of this decline, the main focus of this paper is on the "how." Drawing on CARPE, a harmonized dataset concerning church attendance with almost 2 million observations spanning over 40 years in 39 European countries, this article disentangles the contributions of period change and cohort replacement to the general religious decline. It shows that this decline reflects a real population dynamic based on generational replacement. It is not historical events or developments affecting everyone that undermine religion: new and less religious cohorts are replacing old and more religious ones. Like many other population dynamics, this process is described by an S-shaped curve and applies—with different speeds and levels—to almost all the European countries considered herein. These findings suggest that the effects of the processes of modernization on the mechanisms of religious socialization should be scrutinized more carefully when studying the reasons behind religious decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil society organizations (CSOs) are a cornerstone of democracy in Europe. Nonetheless, "civil society" and "political society" should not be equated as membership-based organizations are not necessarily politically engaged. This paper theorizes and empirically examines which membership-based CSOs engage in interest representation through sustained advocacy activity. We propose an incentive-theoretical framework on CSO investments in advocacy activities—a collective, non-exclusive incentive from which also non-members can profit—by organizations fundamentally dependent on member support. Theorizing how CSOs' own structural characteristics, resource dependencies, and government demand for CSO input affect how CSOs reconcile selective and collective incentive provision, we test our hypotheses using new data from four recent surveys conducted in four European democracies. In line with our framework, CSOs organizing individual citizens rather than corporate actors and those pursuing member interests are less likely to engage in advocacy, while CSO professionalization and state funding access enhance CSOs' propensities to do so. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the former structural CSO characteristics are similarly relevant for CSO advocacy across distinct country settings, while the role of resource variables is mediated by institutional context revealing an important source of inequality in democratic interest representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a new age period cohort model to show that among cohorts born between 1935 and 1975, cohorts born around 1950 are significantly above the income trend in most countries. However, such inequalities between generations are much stronger in conservative, continental European welfare states, compared to social democratic and liberal welfare states. As we show, this is because conservative welfare states expose some cohorts to high youth unemployment and make lifetime earnings dependent on a favorable entry into the labor market. We thus demonstrate that conservative welfare states have put the burden of adjustment to the post-1975 economic slowdown on birth cohorts that could not get stable jobs before 1975, while similar cohort inequalities are much weaker in liberal and social democratic welfare states. In these latter two welfare regimes, the burden of adjustment to the post-1975 economic slowdown was not put on the shoulders of some cohorts relative to others. Our analysis is the first to show which welfare regimes are more conducive to such inequalities between cohorts and what mechanisms lead to these material cohort inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Though it has produced a high-quality body of research, the study of substance use has remained highly individualized in its focus. This paper adds further sociological understanding to that research. Using hierarchical models, the following explores how institutional and criminological theories can be incorporated into substance use research by examining cigarette smoking at 3 levels of variation. Two main findings emerge. First, national legal context plays a role in understanding individual-level probabilities of substance use, even after controlling for individual and local characteristics. For example, lower probabilities of smoking occur where there are smoking bans and minimum purchase ages. Second, the effects of local context, such as unemployment and the percentage of young people, exhibit significant effects on individual-level cigarette use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The questions asked in the paper are whether and to what extent the employment situation among recent third-country immigrants differs across European Union countries and how it is related to these countries' labor market characteristics. The European Labor Force Survey data for the 1990s are used to disentangle the roles that the individual characteristics of immigrants, on the one hand, and the structural features of the receiving societies, on the other, play in the process of immigrants' labor market integration. The results of multilevel regression analyses confirm that in receiving countries with stronger demand for low-skilled labor, unprivileged immigrants are less disadvantaged at employment entry. Among men immigrants' employment disadvantages are found to be lower in liberal welfare states marked by their flexible labor markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widely held argument is that organizations such as the European Community will only succeed if an identification with these organizations develops; and the EC creates this identification. This, in turn, is supposed to diminish identification with national and subnational regions. Based on this argument, some testable propositions are suggested referring to the conditions under which identifications with hierarchical regions -- in this paper Europe, nation states and sub-national regions -- arise and how these identifications are causally related. The propositions are tested with a two-wave panel study carried out in 2000 and 2002 in East Germany. In contrast to the previous argument, we found positive correlations between the three identifications. Furthermore, European identification has positive causal effects on sub-national and national identifications, and sub-national identification has positive causal effects on national and European identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]