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In recent decades, European welfare states have adopted demanding active labour market policies (ALMPs), aimed at increasing labour market participation through imposing stricter work-related obligations and benefit cuts in case of job offer rejection. This article investigates whether support for such demanding ALMPs is driven by risk perceptions of future unemployment and negative stereotypes about unemployed persons. Insights into the role of risk perceptions and stereotypes offer opportunities to gain a better understanding of the impact of structural variables. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey 2016 in 21 European countries, the analysis reveals that higher subjective risk of unemployment decreases support for these ALMPs substantially, whereas negative perceptions of the unemployed increase support. However, these factors play at the individual level only and do not explain country-level differences in support of demanding ALMPs. The notable cross-national variation in support of activation policies is found to be unrelated to economic factors and to the strictness of activation requirements for unemployment benefits.

This study explores contextual sources of attitudes towards refugees by investigating the impact of outgroup size, outgroup proximity (or the presence of an asylum seekers centre), economic conditions, and their interaction on individuals’ attitudes. We analyse data from a cross-sectional survey of the Belgian adult population in October 2017, enriched with municipality-level indicators of intergroup context and economic conditions. Drawing on multilevel regression analyses, our findings show that proximity to an asylum seekers centre and a higher average taxable income of residents are associated with positive individual attitudes towards refugees, while (changes in) outgroup size are not linked with attitudes among this sample. Additionally, our findings indicate that the positive impact of educational attainment on attitudes is amplified (weakened) in municipalities with a larger (smaller) refugee and asylum seeker group size. In summary, these results highlight the relevance of including outgroup proximity at the local level and interactive relations in contextual studies of outgroup attitudes.

Three reforms each appealing to a different logic of (re)distribution are strongly politicized in contemporary welfare states: means-tested benefits, demanding activation policies and basic income schemes. While the policy design of means-tested benefits relies on the distributive justice principle of need, demanding activation policies are intrinsically related to the principle of equity and basic income schemes depend on equality. Based on the moral economy and policy feedback literatures, which assume that public opinion adapts to the normative conceptions of justice encapsulated by institutions, attitudes towards these welfare reforms are expected to be grounded on these distributive logics. However, as these reforms are weakly institutionalized and their underlying principles are politically contested, the normative foundation of their public support remains unclear. This study investigates how distributive justice preferences shape support for these proposals by applying structural equation modelling on data from the CRONOS panel linked to the European Social Survey round 8 (2016/2017). Results indicate that only basic income schemes and demanding activation policies are to some extent connected to each of the justice principles. Overall, this study nevertheless indicates that the justice principles have limited explanatory power, which confirms that attitudes towards contemporary welfare reforms rely weakly on justice norms.

Despite its importance in terms of survey participation, the literature is sparse on how face-to-face interviewers differentially affect specific groups of sample units. This paper demonstrates how an alternative parametrization of the random components in multilevel models, so-called separate coding, delivers valuable insights into differential interviewer effects for specific groups of sample members. In the example of a face-to-face recruitment interview for a probability-based online panel, we detect small interviewer effects regarding survey participation for non-Internet households, whereas we find sizable interviewer effects for Internet households. We derive practical guidance for survey practitioners to address differential interviewer effects based on the proposed variance decomposition.

Multilevel regression analysis is one of the most popular types of analyses in cross-national social studies. However, since its early applications, there have been constant concerns about the relatively small numbers of countries in cross-national surveys and its ability to produce unbiased and accurate country-level effects. A recent review of Bryan and Jenkins (2016) highlights that there are still no clear rules of thumb regarding the minimum number of countries needed. The current recommendations vary from 15 to 50 countries, depending on model complexity.This paper aims to offer a better understanding regarding the consequences of group-level sample size, model complexity, effect size, and estimator procedure on the precision to estimate country-level effects in cross-national studies. The accuracy criteria considered are statistical power, relative parameter bias, relative standard error bias, and convergence rates. We pay special attention to statistical power - a key criteria that has been largely neglected in past research. The results of our Monte Carlo simulation study indicate that the small number of countries found in cross-national surveys seriously affects the accuracy of group-level estimates. Specifically, while a sample size of 30 countries is sufficient to detect large population effects (.5), the probability of detecting a medium (.25) or a small effect (.10) is .4 or .2, respectively. The number of additional group-level variables (i.e., model complexity) included in the model does not disturb the relationship between sample size and statistical power. Hence, adding contextual variables one by one does not increase the power to estimate a certain effect if the sample size is small. Even though we find that Bayesian models have more accurate estimates, there are no notable differences in statistical power between Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian models.

This article aims to explain the paradoxical finding that socio-economically vulnerable groups express more economic, moral and social criticism of the welfare state. As these groups generally benefit more from the welfare state and hold more egalitarian world views, their stronger criticism cannot be explained by the traditional frameworks of self-interest and ideology. As an alternative, we highlight the importance of social experiences of resentment as a source of discontent with welfare state performance. Our contribution argues that the dissatisfaction is embedded in a broader welfare populist critique that pits the hard-working people against the deceitful elite and welfare abusers. This welfare populism emerges from experiences of resentment related to the restructuring of group positions in the process of modernization. We differentiate between three types of discontent: economic status insecurity, group relative deprivation and social distrust. By applying structural equation modelling, we test whether resentful experiences mediate the relationship between the social structural position and welfare state criticism. Results indicate that relative deprivation consistently leads to more economic, moral and social criticism. Social distrust, moreover, stimulates a higher level of moral criticism. This study illustrates that resentment is indeed an important element for understanding the paradoxical relationship between social class and welfare state criticism.

In this article we investigate the electoral decline of the Flemish social democratic party sp.a by analysing the intraparty (in)congruence in opinion structure using a unique pooled dataset that contains party elites, members and voters in Flanders-Belgium. We combine two complementary approaches on incongruence: attitudinal and ideological congruence. A hypothesis derived from post-Marxism is formulated in terms of attitudinal congruence and tested using pairwise means comparisons, while hypotheses from cleavage theory are formulated in terms of ideological incongruence and tested empirically using Latent Class Analysis. Results show that party elites predominantly adhere to a left-universalistic ideology while left-particularists have left the party en masse, confirming the realignment thesis of cleavage theory and rejecting expectations from post-Marxist theory. We conclude that Flemish social democracy's left-universalistic elites have largely lost connection with their left-particularistic base while managing an insufficient appeal among (centre-)left-universalistic middle class voters.

Following the shift towards an activating role of the European welfare states, there is increasing scholarly interest in public support for demanding activation policies that impose obligations on welfare recipients. Borrowing the classical theoretical frameworks used in welfare attitudes research, we aim to disentangle the effect of self-interest and ideological beliefs on support for demanding activation. Using data from the Belgian National Election Study (2014), we find that support for demanding activation is strongly related to authoritarian dispositions, work ethic and rejection of egalitarianism. For the social-structural variables, we find direct as well as indirect (that is, mediated by the ideological dimensions) effects. Controlling for ideology, social categories that are potentially most affected by welfare obligations – i.e. those currently unemployed, with a previous experience of unemployment and low-income individuals – are more likely to oppose demanding policies, which can be interpreted as a self-interest effect. The effects of educational level, conversely, are primarily mediated and should be understood in terms of ideological preferences rather than self-interest. Our results indicate that, when analysing support for specific welfare policies, attention needs to be paid to the interplay between self-interest and ideological preferences. ispartof: Journal Of Social Policy vol:50 issue:2 pages:346-366 status: published

The economic crisis and the unequal degree to which it has affected EU member states have fuelled the debate on whether the EU should take responsibility for the living standards of European citizens. The current article contributes to this debate by investigating for the first time public support for an EU-wide minimum income benefit scheme. Through an analysis of data from the European Social Survey 2016, our results reveal that diverging national experiences and expectations are crucial in understanding why Europeans are widely divided on the implementation of such a benefit scheme. The analysis shows that (1) welfare state generosity and perceived welfare state performance dampen support, (2) those expecting that ‘more Europe’ will increase social protection levels are much more supportive, (3) the stronger support for a European minimum income benefit in less generous welfare states is explained by more-optimistic expectations about the EU’s domestic impact, and (4) lower socioeconomic status groups are more supportive of this policy proposal. These findings can be interpreted in terms of sociotropic and egocentric self-interests, and illustrate how (perceived) performance of the national welfare state and expectations about the EU’s impact on social protection levels shape support for supranational social policymaking. ispartof: Journal of European Social Policy vol:30 issue:4 pages:404-420 status: published

Explaining negative attitudes towards immigration in general and threat due to immigration, in particular, has been a major topic of study in recent decades. While intergroup contact has received considerable attention in explaining ethnic threat, group relative deprivation (GRD), that is, feelings that one’s group is unfairly deprived of desirable goods in comparison to relevant out-groups, has been largely ignored in cross-national research. Nevertheless, various smaller-scale studies have demonstrated that GRD can have a decisive impact on prejudice. In the current study, we examine the association between GRD and ethnic threat systematically across 20 European countries, thereby controlling for intergroup contact and value priorities. The 7th round of the European Social Survey (ESS) includes questions assessing respondents’ feelings of group deprivation compared to immigrants and offers for the first time an opportunity to contextualise the threat-inducing effect of GRD across Europe. A multilevel structural equation model (MLSEM) demonstrates a considerable association between GRD and ethnic threat both on the individual and country levels. The results indicate that GRD is not only an important mediating factor between social structural positions and perceived threat, but also fully mediates the relation between contextual economic indicators and ethnic threat.

Background Already a major health concern, late-life depression (LLD) is expected to form an increasing problem in the aging population. Moreover, despite current treatments, LLD is associated with a poor long-term prognosis and high rate of chronicity. Treatment provision and treatment accordingly warrant improvement, where add-on treatments might contribute to the efficacy of conventional therapies. Although it is known that impaired cognitive control contributes to LDD, it is not targeted sufficiently by current interventions. Research on cognitive control training (CCT) shows promising results on depressive symptoms, cognitive performance, and overall functioning. However, further research is needed to determine the long-term effects of CCT on LLD, its cost-effectiveness, and mechanisms of change. Methods In the current multicenter randomized controlled trial (RCT) with a between-subjects design participants aged 60 years and over with a current LLD receiving treatment as usual (TAU) are randomized to add-on CCT or placebo training. Randomization is stratified by depression severity. Participants will receive eight online CCT or placebo sessions spread across four consecutive weeks. They will complete a post-training assessment after 1 month and three follow-up assessments scheduled three, six and 12 months after completing the training. We expect CCT and TAU to be more (cost-)effective in reducing depressive symptoms than placebo training and TAU. Additionally, we will be looking at secondary clinical, cognitive and global functioning outcomes and likely mechanisms of change (e.g., improved cognitive functioning, reduced rumination, and improved inhibition of negative stimuli). Discussion The proposed RCT aims to contribute to the clinical and scientific knowledge on the long-term effects of CCT as an add-on treatment for LLD. Cost-effectiveness is particularly relevant considering the expected volume of the target demographic. The study will be a pragmatic trial with few inclusion restrictions, providing information on feasibility of web-based trainings in clinical settings. The outcomes are potentially generalizable to guidelines for treatment of LLD. Trial registration This trial is registered in the Netherlands Trial Register (code: NL7639). Registered 3 april 2019.

Purpose This study illustrates the huge untapped potential of quantifying the impact of culture in making meaningful comparisons across groups. Our focus is on cross-national differences in nurses' reports of their relations with physicians, and how the measurement of this complex construct and the evaluation of true differences are related to dimensions of national culture. Design We examine across 14 European countries the association between indices of national culture from the seminal work of Hofstede and 39,435 nurses' ratings of their relations with physicians. Multilevel confirmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate strong factorial invariance across countries and to examine the influence of power distance and masculinity. Findings There was wide variation across countries in nurses' reports of their relations with physicians. Strong factorial invariance was shown for a one-factor model, which confirmed that across countries the seven survey items measure a common factor of physician-nurse relations. This model showed no country bias for any of the seven survey items, which suggests that differences across countries reflect true differences. These true differences were significantly associated with variation in country values of power distance, which showed a significant negative correlation with physician-nurse relations. Conclusions Continuously pursuing a better understanding of characteristics that impact the studied indicators, such as national culture, is elementary to better understand the construct under study. In this application, country values of power distance negatively impacted nurse-reported relations with physicians, which strongly varied across countries. Clinical relevance Better nurse-reported relations between nurses and physicians link to higher nurse job satisfaction, lower emotional exhaustion, better nurse-perceived quality of care, and lower patient mortality. The Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index is an excellent instrument to characterize variation in working relations between nurses and physicians as well as physicians' professional posture towards nurses.

Attitudes toward immigrants are typically investigated from the perspective of the dominant native majority group versus the subordinate ethnic minority group, but there are no apparent reasons why established minority groups would be exempt of negative attitudes towards new immigrant groups. This article investigates the roots of anti-immigrant attitudes among Belgians of Turkish and Moroccan descent. For that purpose, we analyze survey data from the Belgian Ethnic Minorities Elections Study 2014. Our results confirm that negative predispositions toward the arrival of new immigrants in general and Eastern Europeans in particular are also present among Turkish and Moroccan Belgians. Furthermore, we find that feelings of unfair treatment shape anti-immigrant attitudes in important ways. However, the direction of the relationship (positive vs. negative) depends crucially on the specific setting of unfair treatment. While perceived unfair treatment in the labor market arouses interminority hostility, experiences of unfair treatment by the government or in daily life lead to positive attitudes towards newcomers. Identification with the nation rather than with the ethnic group is significantly linked to more negative attitudes towards new immigrants in general (but not towards Eastern European immigrants). We furthermore find that the strength of the relationship between unfair treatment/identity and interminority attitudes depends on the particular immigrant group being evaluated.

The engagement of participants in mandatory national youth service programs is a potentially important, but often neglected factor in understanding why these programs do or do not achieve their intended outcomes. This study examines the engagement of prospective participants in national service by testing competing theoretical frameworks on motivations for volunteering. Specifically, we examine motivational, institutional, and group identity theories and apply them to a mandatory national service program in a non-Western context: Ghana’s National Service Scheme (NSS). We analyze data from an online survey among almost 3,000 university students who are prospective NSS participants. Results indicate that the motivational perspective is very useful to understand engagement in mandatory community service in developing countries. In addition, the institutional and group identity perspectives are found to be complementary to this motivational perspective.

In recent years, the quantitative study of conflict has increasingly focused on small-scale and/or localized conflicts in the developing world. In this paper, we analyze and critically reflect upon a major methodological shortcoming of many studies in this field of research. We argue that by using group- or macro-level empirical data and modelling techniques, while at the same time theoretically underpinning observed empirical associations with individual-level mechanisms, many of these studies risk committing an ecological fallacy. The individual-level mechanism on which many studies rely concerns the presence of grievances which mobilize people to participate in contentious politics. This motivational approach was also present in early studies on protest mobilization in Western societies which often relied on similar research designs. However, subsequent advances in this literature and the use of methods that were targeted more directly at the individual level uncovered that grievances alone cannot explain mobilization and that organizational capabilities and complex psychological mechanisms of belonging also form part of the puzzle. While drawing on conflict event as well as survey data from Africa, we demonstrate empirically that here as well inferring micro-level relations and dynamics from macro-level empirical models can lead to erroneous interpretations and inferences. Hence, we argue that to improve our understanding of conflict mobilization in the developing world, especially for conflicts with low levels of violence, it is necessary to substantially expand our methodological toolbox beyond macro-level analyses. ispartof: Ask. Research & Methods vol:28 issue:1 pages:21-42 status: published

© The Author(s) 2018. In this article, we study how attitudes toward the integration of immigrants (multiculturalism and assimilation) are formed through the interplay between immigration-related threat perceptions, intergroup contacts, and the different migratory backgrounds of residents in a host country. The analysis is conducted using Multiple Group Structural Equation Modeling on data from the 2008 Luxembourg European Values Study. Our findings indicate that stronger perceptions of threat are related to more support for assimilation among all residents and to less support for multiculturalism among native residents and culturally close immigrants. More contact with natives is associated with more support for assimilation among culturally close immigrants and with more threat perceptions among culturally distant immigrants. ispartof: Journal Of Cross-Cultural Psychology vol:52 issue:2 pages:285-310 status: published

In light of the ever-growing shift towards activation in European welfare states, the present article examines the relationship between citizens’ welfare generosity (i.e., support for social rights) and welfare conditionality (i.e., support for social obligations) with regard to the unemployed. Using data from the 2014 Belgian National Elections Study, we found that generosity and conditionality appear to be two sides of the same coin. The two factors are negatively correlated, and most of their respective attitudinal drivers are quite similar in strength, yet opposite in direction. In addition to self-interest and conventionally recognised ideational beliefs, such as egalitarianism and individualism, beliefs about welfare deservingness – an explanatory factor that has remained understudied in the field – are particularly influential in shaping people’s welfare preferences. A stronger emphasis on criteria of deservingness such as control, attitude and reciprocity considerably lowers support for social rights and strengthens support for social duties. ispartof: International Journal Of Social Welfare vol:28 issue:4 pages:454-467 status: published

ispartof: International Journal Of Public Opinion Research vol:33 issue:4 status: Published online

Welzel et al. (2021) claim that non-invariance of instruments is inconclusive and inconsequential in the field for cross-cultural value measurement. In this response, we contend that several key arguments on which Welzel et al. (2021) base their critique of invariance testing are conceptually and statistically incorrect. First, Welzel et al. (2021) claim that value measurement follows a formative rather than reflective logic. Yet they do not provide sufficient theoretical arguments for this conceptualization, nor do they discuss the disadvantages of this approach for validation of instruments. Second, their claim that strong inter-item correlations cannot be retrieved when means are close to the endpoint of scales ignores the existence of factor-analytic approaches for ordered-categorical indicators. Third, Welzel et al. (2021) propose that rather than of relying on invariance tests, comparability can be assessed by studying the connection with theoretically related constructs. However, their proposal ignores that external validation through nomological linkages hinges on the assumption of comparability. By means of two examples, we illustrate that violating the assumptions of measurement invariance can distort conclusions substantially. Following the advice of Welzel et al. (2021) implies discarding a tool that has proven to be very useful for comparativists.

Empirical public opinion research on distributive justice often does not acknowledge that individuals’ social justice preferences may strongly depend on the particular type of distribution at stake and therefore does not take into account the multiplicity of justice principles that people may simultaneously apply in their distributive judgements. As a result, to contribute to the understanding of differentiated justice preferences, we analyse citizens’ preferences for the principles of equality, equity and need in the three welfare domains of health care, pensions and unemployment benefits. In particular, this paper provides insight into the domain specificity of distributive justice preferences, into specific configurations or combinations of justice preferences across domains and into the social and ideological basis of these configurations. On the basis of data from the Belgian National Elections Study of 2014, we conduct a three-step latent class analysis. Results show that the distributive justice principles are preferred to a different extent for various welfare domains and that there is a substantial proportion of respondents that combines different principles of justice across welfare domains. This study also demonstrates that configurations are mainly structured by ideology instead of the social structure.

A steadily growing number of studies investigate how popular support for social policies targeting particular groups is rooted in citizens' deservingness opinions. According to theory, people fall back on five criteria - Control, Attitude, Reciprocity, Identity and Need (CARIN) - to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving. Deservingness opinions are assumed to be important predictors of support for particular welfare arrangements. A striking feature of this emerging research, however, is that there is no agreed-upon strategy to measure deservingness. Most previous studies rely on proxy-variables rather than measuring the actual deservingness criteria. Deservingness functions as a heuristic rather than as a measured concept, which leads to conceptual confusion. To remedy this shortcoming, this contribution proposes and validates a new instrument -the CARIN deservingness principles scale- that captures the five basic deservingness principles. We analyse data from the Belgian National Election Study by means of structural equation modelling (SEM) to (1) test the dimensionality, validity and reliability of the scale, and (2) verify to what extent the five deservingness principles predict specific policy preferences (as a test of construct validity). Our analyses confirm that the five deservingness principles are distinct dimensions that are differently related to social structural variables and have divergent consequences for policy preferences. The finding of theoretically meaningful patterns of differentiated effects illustrates that the CARIN criteria represent distinct logics of social justice, and corroborates that our measurement instrument is capable of tapping into the essence of these criteria. ispartof: Social Science Research vol:85 pages:1-15 ispartof: location:United States status: Published online

The large inflow of asylum-seekers in recent years has heralded a diversification in adopted asylum policies across European societies. Although a growing body of research has addressed these versatile approaches and their implications for the European integration project, insight into the social basis of these restrictive or open asylum policies remains underdeveloped. Hence, the current study provides detailed insight into public preferences for asylum policies and offers a new understanding of how these attitudes are affected by diverging socio-economic realities across Europe. In addition, this paper considers the role of individual factors that coincide with publicly adopted frames in contemporary asylum debates. In particular, to explain how contextual differences reflect on opinion climates, the impacts of the policy, economic, and migratory context are studied. On the individual-level, we focus on threat perception and human values, which represent humanitarian, economic, and cultural frames. To explore these relations, data on 20 countries from the European Social Survey Round 8 (2016) are analyzed through a multilevel structural equation modeling approach. Results indicate that, on the contextual-level, only unemployment rates have a significant impact and, rather surprisingly, lower unemployment rates provoke a more negative opinion climate. Yet, this relationship seems to be largely driven by some specific countries that are characterized by large unemployment rates and relatively positive opinion climates simultaneously. The migratory and policy context, on the other hand, do not influence attitudes toward asylum policy. This indicates that it is not necessarily the countries facing the largest inflow of asylum-seekers or issuing the most positive decisions on asylum applications that have the most restrictive opinion climates. As shown by the important roles of human values and threat perceptions, which represent widely adopted frames, public discourses seem much more important in explaining attitudes toward asylum policy across Europe. ispartof: Frontiers in Sociology vol:5 pages:1-16 ispartof: location:Switzerland status: published

The European Union has gradually assumed increasing authority in the domain of social policy. This increasing importance of Social Europe fundamentally redraws the boundaries of existing solidarity arrangements. This chapter investigates whether the Europeanisation of social policy creates new structural conflicts between winners (benefiting from the expansion of individual mobility options) and losers (having far less exit options while being exposed to international competition) of European integration. Using data of the Belgian National Election Survey 2014, we investigate citizens’ preferences regarding various dimensions of the role of the European Union in social policy. Our results show that attitudes towards Social Europe are not strongly embedded in social structural characteristics. Rather than objective positions, subjective experiences and social dispositions shape one’s stance on Social Europe. published

This contribution argues that neither the self-interest framework, nor theories about cultural dispositions are sufficient to fully explain why socio-economically vulnerable groups express more criticism on the welfare state. We highlight the importance of social experiences as a source of this discontent with the functioning of the welfare state. First, this dissatisfaction is embedded in a broader welfare populism that pits the hard-working people against the deceitful elite and welfare abusers. Second, we argue that welfare populism arises as a result of experiences of resentment that are the result of the restructuring of relative group positions. We differentiate between four types of discontent: economic insecurity, relative deprivation, social distrust and powerlessness. Using structural equation modelling, we test whether these experiences mediate the relationship between the social structure and welfare state criticism. The results indicate that relative deprivation consistently leads to more economic and moral criticism, and lowers perceptions of the positive social consequences. Social distrust, moreover, stimulates a higher level of moral criticism. This study illustrates that resentment can partly explain the paradoxical findings on the relationship between social class and welfare state criticism.

In this article, we examine whether cross-national studies disclose enough information for independent researchers to evaluate the validity and reliability of the findings (evaluation transparency) or to perform a direct replication (replicability transparency). The first contribution is theoretical. We develop a heuristic theoretical model including the actors, factors, and processes that influence the transparency of cross-national studies and provide an overview of the measures currently taken to improve research transparency. The second contribution is empirical, in which we analyze the level of transparency in published cross-national studies. Specifically, using a random sample of 305 comparative studies published in one of 29 peer-reviewed social sciences journals (from 1986 to 2016), we show that, even though all the articles include some methodological information, the great majority lack sufficient information for evaluation and replication. Lastly, we develop and propose a set of transparency guidelines tailored for reporting cross-national survey research.

In this article we argue that an exclusive focus on the generalized aspect of prejudice limits understanding of the structure and genesis of prejudice towards particular out-groups. In order to conceptualize the specific nature of particular prejudices, we propose the differentiated threat approach. This framework postulates that different out-groups challenge diverse realistic and symbolic interests, and that these out-group specific threats affect various socio-economic strata and cultural groups differentially.\ud \ud The differentiated threat approach is applied to analyse majority-group Belgians’ attitudes towards immigrants, Muslims, Jews and homosexuals. The results show that a common denominator of prejudice can be distinguished, but that the prejudices towards the various out-groups contain substantively relevant unique components that are influenced by socio-demographic and attitudinal predictors in diverging ways. Gender traditionalism is found to reinforce homonegativity and temper Islamophobia at the same time. Feelings of relative deprivation are more strongly related to Islamophobia than to other forms of prejudice, and are unrelated to homonegativity. Religious involvement plays a more decisive role in the formation of antiSemitism and homonegativity than it does in the other forms of prejudice. Anti-immigration attitudes show a class gradient that is absent in attitudes towards other out-groups. Our results evidence that the concrete realization of attitudes towards a specific out-group cannot be understood without paying attention to structural and contextual factors, such as social positions, the nature of inter-group relations, power balances and elite discourses.

This study investigates whether citizens’ concerns about the EU’s impact on social security are a distinct source of Euroscepticism. By analysing data from the European Values Study 2008, we show that citizens differentiate between domain-specific fears about European integration (i.e. about social security, national sovereignty, culture, payments and jobs), meaning that they cannot be reduced completely to a general fear about European integration. Furthermore, socioeconomic determinants and ideological position are more important in explaining citizens’ fear about the EU’s impact on social security than in explaining their generalised fear of European integration. In countries with higher social spending, citizens are more fearful of European integration in general, however, social spending does not affect fears about social security more strongly than it affects other EU-related fears. ispartof: European Union Politics vol:19 issue:2 pages:209-232 status: published

Whereas research on generalized prejudice is dominated by variable-centered approaches, which focus on communalities between different types of prejudice, we propose a complementary person-centered approach, looking for subgroups of people characterized by similar patterns of prejudice. To this end, we compare the results of a variable-centered (using confirmatory factor analysis [CFA]) and a person-centered (using latent class analysis [LCA]) approach to generalized prejudice. While CFA points to a multidimensional solution with a strong overlap between prejudice dimensions, LCA distinguishes five prejudice patterns that cannot be organized along a linear continuum of more versus less prejudiced dispositions. Explanatory models for the two solutions are estimated. Results show that the two methods are largely complementary in conceptualizing generalized prejudice.

Political distrust is often widespread in African countries, but the prospects for increasing trust are uncertain given the lack of research on the origins of political trust in the region. Using the 2013 NSS Survey in Ghana and employing hierarchical regression analyses, we develop a model of institutional trust based on insights from both cultural and institutional performance theories. The results clearly support the superiority of institutional performance theories while at the same time providing limited support for cultural explanations. National pride, however, does also substantially encourage institutional trust. This asks for future, cultural-specific studies on trust-building in developing countries trying to establish working institutions using more representative, cross-national, and longitudinal data.

© 2019, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature. This contribution focuses on a model that is gaining currency in cross-national research, namely multilevel structural equation modelling (MSEM). Similarly to standard multilevel modelling (MLM), this model distinguishes between various levels of analysis (e. g., individuals nested within countries) and, in doing so, takes the hierarchical structure of cross-national data into account. However, MSEM incorporates a latent-variable approach into the multilevel framework, making it possible to assess the measurement quality of latent constructs. As such, MSEM is a synthesis of structural equation modeling (SEM) and MLM that combines the best of both worlds. The MSEM approach makes it possible to model multilevel mediations and group-level outcomes, and therefore provides a more complete representation of Coleman’s bathtub model. This contribution presents the statistical and conceptual background of MSEM in a formal but accessible manner. The paper discusses applications of MSEM that are particularly useful for cross-national comparative research (CNCR), namely two-level confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), multilevel mediation models, and models for group-level outcomes. A practical step-by-step strategy on how MSEM can be used for applied research is provided and illustrated by means of a didactical example. ispartof: Kolner Zeitschrift Fur Soziologie Und Sozialpsychologie vol:71 issue:71 pages:129-155 status: published

This article investigates public support for two types of EU‐wide solidarity that currently exist, namely member state solidarity (such as transfers to less developed and crisis‐hit countries) and transnational solidarity (such as granting cross‐border social rights to EU citizens). Drawing on data from the 2014 Belgian National Election Study, we find that opposition towards European integration – in particular regarding EU enlargement – reduces citizens' willingness to support European solidarity to a large extent. However, this article reveals that public support for European solidarity cannot simply be reduced to a pro‐versus anti‐integration, nor to a domestic left–right conflict. Citizens' substantive positions towards the EU's social and economic agenda are a crucial element in understanding contestation over European integration issues.