European Sociological Review - recent issues

Does Unemployment Help or Hinder Becoming Independent? The Role of Employment Status for Leaving the Parental Home

Jacob, M., Kleinert, C. — 2008-03-17

Two broad trends in industrialized countries motivate this article: on the one hand, the life phase between youth and adulthood has prolonged and diversified; on the other hand, entering the labour market has become more complex and insecure. The article combines two aspects of these trends by analysing the effect of unemployment on leaving home. Extending previous research, we use a resource-oriented theoretical framework that allows us to elaborate the impact of employment-related resources of different actors. Our main hypothesis is that availability of employment related resources matters for leaving home. Furthermore, we assume that several actors are involved in the decision to leave home: individual, welfare state, parents, and partner. Resources of each can be pooled, and resources of other actors can compensate for own shortages. In the analyses we use life history data of two birth cohorts in West Germany. We find that for young adults with partners own unemployment accelerates leaving home, while for singles leaving home is delayed. Parental resources and unemployment benefits also have only an effect if young adults have no partners. Thus, partnership status plays a crucial role in shaping the transitions of youth to residential independence.

Status Inconsistency Revisited: An Improved Statistical Model

Zhang, X. — 2008-03-17

Gerhard Lenski hypothesized that status inconsistency leads to mental stress, social isolation, and liberal political views. But intensive empirical research has failed to observe these consequences. The statistical methods used in the research controlled for the main effects of relative positions in hierarchies by including the additive terms. But they neglected another confounding source, the interaction effect caused by reasons other than status inconsistency, while there was empirical evidence for its existence. This paper proposes an improved statistical model that controls for this confounding source by including one more term, a multiplicative term, while using the absolute difference between relative positions in different hierarchies to measure the effect of status inconsistency. This model is applied to the GSS data, and the hypothesized consequences are observed. Statistical results show that status inconsistency between education and income undermined self-rated health, satisfaction with leisure life, trust in other individuals in society, social participation in various groups and organizations, confidence in political and economic institutions, and conservative political party identification.

A New Dimension of Social Stratification in Poland? Class Membership and Electoral Voting in 1991-2001

Domanski, H. — 2008-03-17

In contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, the debate on class politics takes on a different form to that in the West—its concern is whether class divisions increased as the post-communist societies made the transition to the market system. Using Polish survey data on respondents voting behaviour in elections of 1991, 1994, 1997, and 2001, I present evidence on the significance of social class for voting behaviour. Results of log-linear analysis show that class membership does indeed exert a significant impact on voting behaviour. Although it changed across the time, it appeared no less in 2001 than in 1991. Also the patterns of this association (which class votes which party?) remained unchanged. On the whole our evidence suggests that in Poland a new dimension of social stratification—that which is referred in sociological literature as ‘class politics’—has emerged. At the same time, claims for the class basis of voting in Poland should not be exaggerated, as the class-vote link in Poland is much lower than in most of the Western societies. To estimate the relative strength of this association I compared it across 17 countries using data from the European Social Survey 2002.

Self-Perceived Job Insecurity and Social Context: A Multi-Level Analysis of 17 European Countries

Erlinghagen, M. — 2008-03-17

Job insecurity causes far-reaching negative outcomes. The fear of job loss damages the health of employees and reduces the productivity of firms. Thus, job insecurity should result in increasing social costs. Analysing representative data from 17 European countries, this paper investigates self-perceived job insecurity. Our multi-level analysis reveals significant cross-country differences in individuals’ perception of job insecurity. This finding is not only driven by social-structural or institutional differences, but the perception of job insecurity is also influenced by nation-specific unobserved characteristics.

The Effect of Occupational Sex-Composition on Earnings: Job-Specialization, Sex-Role Attitudes and the Division of Domestic Labour in Spain

Polavieja, J. G. — 2008-03-17

Important theoretical controversies remain unresolved in the literature on occupational sex-segregation and the gender wage gap. These controversies can be summarized as a debate between cultural-socialization arguments and economic or rational-action theories of specialization. The article discusses these theories in detail and carries out a preliminary test of the relative explanatory performance of some of their most consequential predictions. This is done by drawing on the Spanish sample of the second round of the European Social Survey (ESS). Empirical results suggest that the effect of occupational sex-segregation on wages could be explicable by workers’ sex-role attitudes, their relative input in domestic production and the job-specific human-capital requirements of their jobs. Of these three factors, job-specialization seems clearly the most important one.

Ethnic Competition and Opposition to Ethnic Intermarriage in the Netherlands: a Multi-Level Approach

Tolsma, J., Lubbers, M., Coenders, M. — 2008-03-17

This study investigates the relationship between characteristics of the living environment and antagonistic attitudes towards ethnic out-groups, with a focus on the explanation of opposition to ethnic intermarriage. Previous studies on the relationship between the living environment and prejudice-related attitudes used at most a limited set of contextual characteristics. We investigate to what extent relative group sizes, economic competition, cultural competition, safety threats, and social cohesion within Dutch municipalities and neighbourhoods affect antagonistic attitudes once social origin characteristics and other relevant individual-level characteristics are controlled for. To test hypotheses derived from Ethnic Competition Theory and Contact Theory, we used data from the Netherlands Kinship and Panel Survey supplemented with unique aggregate demographic statistics. The results show that proximity of ethnic out-group members in the municipality reduces opposition to ethnic heterogamy. However, an increase in the ethnic out-group proportion is positively related to opposition to ethnic intermarriage. Moreover, at the neighbourhood level, proximity of ethnic outgroups increases opposition among the lower educated, whereas it decreases opposition among the higher educated. These findings indicate that the threat mechanism, the contact mechanism, and selective migration operate at the same time. Economic competition is the only type of competition that evokes opposition to ethnic intermarriage.

Conditions for the Explanatory Power of Life Styles

Rossel, J. — 2008-03-17

Life style research has become an independent branch of social structural analysis that systematically complements the role of classical research on social inequality in explaining social action. However, there are important gaps in life style research. First, theoretical bases for explaining the statistical connection between life styles and social action are lacking. Secondly, it remains unclear why life styles sometimes are good predictors of social action and sometimes are not. In a first step this article puts forward an action-theoretic framework as a basis for life style research that implies a conceptual shift from life styles to cultural preferences. In a second step it develops three hypotheses that set out the conditions for a high or low explanatory power of cultural preferences. They are empirically tested by way of a data analysis that supports the applicability of the theoretical ideas developed in the paper.

Early Ethnic Educational Inequality: The Influence of Duration of Preschool Attendance and Social Composition

Biedinger, N., Becker, B., Rohling, I. — 2008-03-17

Ethnic inequality in education is a well-established topic among the scientific community. We assume that ethnic inequality is constituted early in life—before a child has even started school. Differences between natives and immigrants with regard to preschool attendance (if, when, and which preschool is attended) may account for some of the ethnic educational inequality upon entering school. We use the school entrance examination data of the City of Osnabrück (Germany) for the years 2000–2005 to analyse the school readiness of 6- to 7-year-old children as an indicator of early school success. It is apparent that the amount of preschool experience improves school readiness, even when controlling for family background. While this is true for all children, immigrant children nonetheless exhibit lower scores on school readiness when all these individual explaining factors are controlled for. Multilevel analysis shows that the ethnic effect differs among preschools. A preschool's influence depends on its social composition: preschools with a beneficial social composition are better able to promote children's development than those with a poorer learning context. Immigrant children benefit particularly from longer attendance at preschools with a positive context.

The Interface Between Social Research and Policy Making

Hernes, G. — 2008-03-17

Problems of communication often arise when social research is to be used as premises for policy making. In this paper it is argued that the two activities are entirely different, yet that there is a logical parallelism between theory construction and policy making which can be identified in four steps. Where scientists make observations, politicians raise issues. Where scientists propose explanations, politicians propose remedies. Where scientists draw empirical consequences and make predictions from their models, politicians work out possible political implications of their proposals. Where scientists rule out explanations when the predictions from them do not correspond to facts, politicians rule out options or reforms that are not feasible or workable. Where scientists try to explain the actual world, politicians attempt to create possible worlds. Both professions not only demand acuity and test imagination but also summon the capacity to spot import and resolve controversies.

Craig A. Parsons and Timothy M. Smeeding (Eds): Immigration and the Transformation of Europe.

Dronkers, J. — 2008-03-17

Jorg Flecker (Ed.): Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right.

Ivarsflaten, E. — 2008-03-17

Rational Action Theory and Educational Attainment. Changes in the Impact of Economic Resources

Hansen, M. N. — 2008-01-16

The article addresses the question of whether the impact of economic resources on educational attainment has changed over time. According to the rational action perspective, variations in parental economic resources should be an important source of inequality in educational attainment, because richer families most easily can pay for their children's education. Moreover, inequalities should increase in periods with increasing economic inequality and insecurity. There is no large body of systematic empirical knowledge supporting these assumptions. The data used here is a large sample consisting of the total cohorts of Norwegians born between 1955 and 1984, thus covering the thirty-year period up to the most recent years. Parental economic resources are measured as the mean earnings of father and mother the five years before leaving compulsory school. The analyses indicate that the impact of economic resources has varied in a curvilinear fashion, with decreasing inequality among the older cohorts and increasing inequality among the younger cohorts. This pattern fits well with expectations based on economic developments in Norway in the period as economic inequality and unemployment increased in the period with increasing inequality in educational attainment.

Patterns of Regional Inequality in the Enlarged Europe

Heidenreich, M., Wunder, C. — 2008-01-16

Regional economic inequalities are increasing in most of the European Union (EU) member states, while between-nation inequalities in the enlarged Europe are declining in the last years. The economic differences between East and West Europe are gradually diminishing and the EU is becoming a relatively homogeneous economic, legal, and political field, which promotes social and economic cohesion in Europe (at a rate of approximately 2 per cent per year). Most of the regional economic inequalities are already inequalities within nations. The economic and income inequalities in the enlarged EU can be largely explained by different regional employment patterns, industrial structures and the region's location within the European space: central urban regions with a good research and traffic infrastructure, qualified employees, a high employment rate and knowledge-intensive services are the best predictors for high income levels. The slow convergence process in the enlarged EU may not increase popular support for the European integration process because the most important frame of reference is still the nation-state where regional inequalities are increasing.

Do Welfare Benefits Affect Women's Choices of Adult Care Giving?

Sarasa, S. — 2008-01-16

This article tries to analyse the effects of old age and disability benefits on women's decisions to allocate time to adult care giving. More specifically, it evaluates the welfare neutrality of proposals oriented by preference theory in favour of cash transfers instead of services provision. Cross-sectional and event history analysis techniques are used with pooled European household panel data and aggregated indicators of public spending on old age and disability benefits. The article arrives at two main conclusions: (i) non-mean-tested provision of benefits lowers the risk of heavy adult care giving among all women, while means-tested benefits have no significant effect on poor women's behaviour, and (ii) providing services is more efficient than cash transfers in reducing women's probability of allocating many hours to adult care.

Anti-Immigrant Attitudes in Europe: Outgroup Size and Perceived Ethnic Threat

Schneider, S. L. — 2008-01-16

This study focuses on ethnic competition as a contextual explanation of cross-national differences in anti-immigrant prejudice. It contributes to the existing literature by refining the concept of ethnic competition into a socio-economic and a cultural aspect, which is reflected in two different measures of outgroup size. To improve cross-national comparability, the outgroup size measure is based on foreign country of birth instead of citizenship. Moreover, as outgroup size does not only measure competition, but also contact opportunities and familiarity with immigration, intergroup contact theory is taken into account and a non-linear relationship between outgroup size and perceived ethnic threat is tested. This study employs multi-level linear regression and uses the first round data set of the European Social Survey. The main conclusions of this analysis are that economic and social competition between groups might play a lesser role in the explanation of cross-national differences in anti-immigrant attitudes than often assumed, and that it might be rather lacking familiarity and fear of conflict over values and culture that drive the relationship between outgroup size and anti-immigrant attitudes.

Sports in Civil Society: Networks, Social Capital and Influence

Seippel, O. — 2008-01-16

Sports represent the largest category of voluntary organizations in many European countries. This article addresses questions concerning the position, centrality and influence of sports organizations as one specific part of civil society, and is based on an approach providing information on networks between categories of organizations. These networks consist of overlapping affiliations to organizations which are then interpreted as structures making communication, persuasion and influence possible. From these networks, position, centrality and potential influence of sports organizations in civil society are analysed. The article also looks more specifically at the links between sports and seven other types of voluntary organizations. The data is based on Norwegian surveys from 1982, 1990, and 2003, providing the possibility to follow sports organizations over a period of 20 years. The results show that sports organizations are influential due to size, but relatively weakly embedded and positioned in civil society. This position is, however, strengthened compared to most other organizations during the last 20 years. Regarding the relation of sports to other specific organizations some type of ‘normalization’ seems to have taken place, and sports are socially ‘closer’ to most organizations in 2003 than in 1982.

Resources of the Partner: Support or Restriction in the Occupational Career? Developments in the Netherlands Between 1940 and 2003

Verbakel, E., de Graaf, P. M. — 2008-01-16

This study investigates the role of the partner in career mobility in The Netherlands from the 1940s to the present. Mobility has been defined as upward and downward moves in occupational status. First, we hypothesize that having a partner restricts the labour market career of women, whereas it supports labour market advancement of men. Second, we formulate opposing hypotheses about the effect of partners’ resources; social capital notions predict positive partner effects, whereas economic theory predicts negative partner effects. Third, we propose trend hypotheses; the process of individualization makes us predict declines in partner effects, but the processes of cultural and economic modernization lead us to hypothesize a shift from negative to positive partner effects on female career mobility. We use event history analysis techniques covering the complete labour market careers of 5,068 respondents and their partners (Family Survey Dutch Population 1998–2003). We find no evidence for the idea that having a partner has an effect on career mobility of women, and we find a small positive effect on men's mobility. Labour market resources of the partner positively affect upward career moves, whereas they negatively affect downward career moves for both men and women. The data provide no evidence for historical developments in the influence of the partner on individual career mobility.

National Context and Spouses' Housework in 34 Countries

Knudsen, K., Waerness, K. — 2008-01-16

By focusing on how national context and individual factors affect spouses’ absolute and relative contributions, social scientists are better able to understand couples’ organising and sharing of housework. Previous studies have suggested a linkage between female empowerment and the division of housework; however, documented effects have proven inconsistent. The authors propose that a less pronounced cross-national pattern for relative efforts reflects the fact that national context affect wives’ and husbands’ total involvement in the same direction. A reinterpretation of the ‘discount’ hypothesis is also suggested, relating interaction effects for relative efforts to non-interaction for spouses’ total contributions. Moreover, extending the causal model to include economic development as a macro-level explanatory variable permits a nuanced account of how different aspects of national context affect wives’ and husbands’ housework decisions. Within this extended framework the initially weak female empowerment—relative division linkage appears stronger. Based on a multilevel analysis of recently released data from 34 countries in the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), this article, on a wider basis than hitherto possible, jointly analyses spouses’ absolute and relative contributions, and investigates the interplay between macro-level forces and individual-level factors in influencing couples’ domestic labour.

Childcare Strategies of Divorced Mothers in Europe: A Comparative Analysis

Raeymaeckers, P., Dewilde, C., Snoeckx, L., Mortelmans, D. — 2008-01-16

In this contribution, we focus on the influence of employment-supportive policies on the childcare strategies of a specific subgroup of mothers, namely, divorced mothers. As previous research has shown, the economic consequences of divorce are mitigated by the provision of formal childcare, allowing divorced mothers to combine work and care and thus achieve a decent level of economic well-being. Our main hypotheses deal with the interplay between formal and informal childcare systems. While the crowding-out hypothesis states that formal childcare provision relaxes the functions that used to be provided by informal networks, the crowding-in thesis postulates that mothers use a mixture of strategies in search of an optimal combination between formal and informal childcare. Using longitudinal data from the ECHP for 13 countries, we evaluate the influence of a variety of macro-level indicators referring to the formal and informal care provision on the use of different types of childcare after divorce. Our empirical evidence points at the existence of a crowding-in effect, be it in a specific way. We find that while the use of both formal and informal childcare is mainly driven by the available formal arrangements, social networks fulfil an important complementary role, enabling divorced mothers to increase their use of formal childcare. More specifically, we find that in countries with limited formal childcare provision, extended informal support results in an increased use of formal childcare. In welfare states with ample formal childcare, divorced women need less help from informal caregivers, although the latter are still essential for mothers in order to synchronize work and formal childcare.

Per-Olof Wikstrom and Robert J. Sampson (Eds): The Explanation of Crime. Context, Mechanisms and Development.

Mehlkop, G. — 2008-01-16

Mohamed Cherkaoui: Invisible Codes: Essays on Generative Mechanisms * Mohamed Cherkaoui: Good Intentions: Max Weber and the Paradox of Unintended Consequences

Edling, C. — 2008-01-16

Class Clues

Tahlin, M. — 2007-11-23

Despite recurrent controversy, class theory remains the major sociological explanation of social inequality. While there are several approaches to class theory, one particular model has achieved dominance in empirical research over the last decades: the EGP (or Goldthorpe) class schema. In this article, the theoretical foundations of this model are tested empirically on the basis of unique Swedish data on employment relations. The outcome of the test is decisively negative for the theory. Reciprocal dependence relations between workers and employers—at the center of attention in current conceptual accounts, but never before explicitly measured—are conspicuously unimportant in a class context. Instead, the main source of class advantage among employees is the skill content of jobs. This accords well with parts of the early theoretical justifications of the EGP class model, elements that have since been abandoned. It is suggested that future theoretical work on class inequality should return to the skill-based roots of the model and proceed from there. Such a return is additionally motivated by a wealth of evidence from the literature on work-life stratification that class research has so far tended to ignore.

Economic Inequality In and Outside of Marriage: Individual Resources and Institutional Context

Yodanis, C., Lauer, S. — 2007-11-23

Using cross-nationally comparative data from 15 country contexts, we focus on economic inequality at the national-level and its direct and moderating effects on the likelihood of couples having equal versus unequal arrangements for managing money. Confirming earlier research and theory, we find that the gendered context matters. Our results also show that the overall level of economic inequality in a country shapes the likelihood of having equal versus unequal money arrangements in marriage. All three measures of economic inequality—national income inequality, public spending on social programs, and ideological support for inequality—are significantly related to how couples manage their money. Within a context which practices and supports economic inequality, couples themselves are more likely to practice economic inequality.

The First Cut is the Deepest? The Role of the Relationship Career for Union Formation

Poortman, A.-R. — 2007-11-23

Using retrospective data from the survey Divorce in the Netherlands 1998, I examine the influence of the relationship career on chances of union formation. Frailty models accounting for unobserved heterogeneity show that previous union experiences reduce chances of union formation. Furthermore, formerly married persons are less likely to enter a new union than former cohabiters, and so are people who had short-lived prior unions or had children. Findings also indicate that the first cut is the deepest. Union formation probabilities drop substantially after the first union dissolves but remain constant after subsequent break-ups. Finally, the impact of prior union experiences on subsequent union formation is generally found to be stronger for women than men.

When Fertility is Bargained: Second Births in Denmark and Spain

Brodmann, S., Esping-Andersen, G., Guell, M. — 2007-11-23

We examine the degree to which women's fertility decisions depend on greater gender symmetry in child care. We analyse second births and focus particularly on the importance of fatherly care for women with a strong career orientation. Exploiting the European Community Household Panel, we use event-history techniques and compare Denmark and Spain, two countries that represent the European extremes in terms of both fertility and public support for working mothers. Compared to the Spanish case, Danish women are more likely to have a second child, in general because welfare state support makes reconciliation of motherhood and careers easier. We show that Danish career women are additionally able to reduce the opportunity cost of motherhood via enhanced fatherly child care due to bargaining between the spouses.

Value of Children and the Framing of Fertility: Results from a Cross-cultural Comparative Survey in 10 Societies

Nauck, B. — 2007-11-23

To overcome incomplete explanations of cross-cultural differences in fertility behaviour, three complementary approaches are systematically related to each other: the ‘demand’-based economic theory of fertility (ETF), a revised version of the ‘supply’-based ‘value-of-children’-approach (VOC) as a special theory of the general social theory of social production functions, and the framing theory of variable rationality. A comprehensive model is specified, which accounts both for the variable efficiency of having children for the optimization of physical well-being and of social esteem of (potential) parents, and for the variable rationality of fertility decisions. The model is tested with a data set, which comprises information on VOC and fertility of women within social settings of 10 societies (Peoples Republic of China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Ghana, Israel, Palestine, Turkey, the Czech Republic, and Germany), using multivariate models with births of different parity as dependents. As empirical research both on ETF and VOC only exists for intra-societal comparisons, the simultaneous test in a cross-cultural context goes beyond the current state of fertility research. It provides evidence about the cross-cultural validity of the model, systematic effects of VOC on fertility, and changing rationality of fertility decisions in the demographic transition.

Heterogeneity in Post-materialist Value Priorities. Evidence from a Latent Class Discrete Choice Approach

Moors, G., Vermunt, J. — 2007-11-23

Protagonists of values theory such as Inglehart—among others—have argued that values should be conceived of as relative priorities rather than absolute preferences. As such they insist on using ranking techniques of measurement which generates choice data. In this study, we aim at validating the measurement of Inglehart's (post-)materialism by means of a latent class discrete choice model. We argue that from a statistical point of view this is the appropriate way of dealing with ranking data. Furthermore, the analyses revealed a heterogeneity in (post-)materialist value priorities that has previously been left unobserved. Consistent with Inglehart's research a post-materialist class is discerned irrespective of the number of latent classes that is selected. However, as far as materialism is concerned three different types of materialist concerns can be distinguished. The validity of the empirical typology is further demonstrated by linking it to key covariates and political attitudes.

Systems of Distribution and a Sense of Equity: A Multilevel Analysis of Meritocratic Attitudes in Post-industrial Societies

Kunovich, S., Slomczynski, K. M. — 2007-11-23

Meritocratic attitudes are defined as general beliefs that education and its correlates should determine personal economic outcomes. Using the International Social Survey Project (ISSP): Social Inequality Module (1992), we examine both individual-level and country-level determinants of pro-meritocratic attitudes. According to self-interest and rational-action theories, individuals with high educational attainment and high personal income are expected to have strong meritocratic beliefs because meritocracy is in their best interest—they would gain under such a system. At the same time, both modernization and post-industrial theories imply that persons living in countries with a high degree of societal meritocracy hold stronger meritocratic beliefs than persons living in countries with low degree of societal meritocracy. Results of the Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis on a data set including 7,972 persons from 14 countries indicate that the impact of individuals’ education and income on meritocratic attitudes occurred as theoretically predicted. We also demonstrate that the relationship between the degree of societal meritocracy and the degree of support for such a system is statistically significant even if national wealth and educational stock (as well as individual-level variables) are controlled. In addition, we discovered that at the beginning of the 1990s a post-communist regime had a negative effect on support for meritocracy.

Bernhard Ebbinghaus: Reforming Early Retirement in Europe, Japan and the USA.

Leeson, G. W. — 2007-11-23

Ronald S. Burt: Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital.

Comet, C. — 2007-11-23