All time references are in CEST
European Values Study and World Values Survey: Exploring New Survey Findings and Addressing Methodological Challenges 2 |
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| Session Organisers | Dr Vera Lomazzi (University of Bergamo, Italy) Dr Kseniya Kizilova (Institute for Comparative Survey Research, Austria) Professor Ruud Luijkx (Tilburg University; University of Trento) |
| Time | Wednesday 19 July, 11:00 - 12:30 |
| Room | U6-22 |
The European Values Study (EVS) and the World Values Survey (WVS) are two large-scale comparative time-series survey research programs studying people’s values, norms and beliefs. Since 1981, these programmes have jointly carried out representative national surveys in over 120 countries and societies containing 92 percent of the world’s population representing an invaluable data source for a global network of scholars and international development agencies, including the World Bank, the UNDP, the WHO, regional development banks etc.
Over the years, the EVS and the WVS have proven the importance of population value study and have demonstrated that people’s beliefs play a key role in economic development, emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions, rise of gender equality, and the extent to which societies have effective government.
We welcome submissions based on EVS/WVS data addressing substantive and/or methodological aspects of value research.
The recently published joint EVS-WVS dataset (2017-2022) and the EVS-WVS trend file (1981-2022) allow social and political sciences to broaden and deepen their analysis. Present session invites papers which make use of the EVS/WVS data -solely or in combination with other types of data- to address a broad scope of issues, including political culture and political attitudes, support for democracy and political participation, perceptions of gender equality and moral values, identity and trust, civil society, corruption, solidarity, and migration among the others.
We also invite papers addressing the projects’ methodological aspects, including challenges and limitations such as reliability and equivalence of employed scales and indicators, non-responses, combining self- and interviewer-administered mode and other. The panel particularly invites papers comparing findings collected via different survey methods in the same countries allowing to estimate the reliability of online surveys and discuss challenges and prospects of their combined use.
Keywords: values; EVS; WVS
Dr Simona Guglielmi (University of Milan) - Presenting Author
All over Europe, opposition to immigrants seems to intertwine with the attempt to (re)affirm a collective identity around an ethnic majoritarian conception of national identity. EVS offers a unique opportunity to investigate this topic theoretically and methodologically, with a particular reference to the widely debated civic/ethnic dichotomy.
The paper focuses on the mechanisms underlying the link between national identity, perceived threats, and outgroup trust‐related emotions as predictors of support for migrant employment policy based on the nativist argument. The National Identity Threat Trust model (NITT) is theorized. The main claim is that national identity influences attitudes on immigrant discrimination: directly, as a specific form of ingroup favouritism that arises in competitive intergroup contexts, as purported by Social Identity Theory; and indirectly because national identity may contribute to a deteriorating climate of intergroup relations, according to the “Group Identity Lens Model”.
Empirically, a structural equation model was specified consisting of: 1) the measurement model, which includes five latent variables (ethnic majoritarianism, civility, globalism, distrust of foreigners, realistic threat); 2) the causal model which, based on the NITT assumptions, links the five latent variables and three observed variables (national attachment, symbolic threat, native employment priority). The study includes North-Western (France, Germany, Great Britain) Central-Eastern (Hungary, Poland) and Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Italy). Cross-national invariance of latent variables is tested using Multi Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA).
Three main hypotheses are at stake:
1) the ethnic majoritarian conception of national identity has a positive impact on perceived threats and trust‐related emotions, which in turn influence support for native employment priority;
2) also the civil conception contributes to increasing support for native employment priority, but indirectly via positive association with perceived threats;
3) citizens close to right-wing nativist exhibit a similar structure.
Professor Ming-Chang Tsai (Academia Sinica) - Presenting Author
Postmaterialism has long been considered as an expressive value embraced by certain cohorts who grew up in a relatively wealthy environment. This study challenges this generational replacement hypothesis and suggests that value shifts in a population which emerge in large magnitude in short time span due to outside pressing forces. By simultaneously observing the changing value trends of the US, Japan, Turkey and China over 20 years on the basis of the data of the World Values Survey, this study performs an Age-Period-Cohort analysis with the intrinsic estimates model for decomposing the otherwise knotted effects of age, period and cohort in contexts of different income level and cultural background. The results show that cohort characteristics is less obvious than the influences brought about by specific periods, when important individual backgrounds are also taken into account. Two important contributions are noted. First, more effective estimation of age, period and cohort effect is a necessity for advancing strong evidence-based arguments. Second, taking a new, different value position at a societal level can be an instant happening whose underlying logics need urgent research.
Dr Anna Pless (Goethe-University Frankfurt)
Dr Yassine Khoudja (Goethe-University Frankfurt) - Presenting Author
Professor Daniela Grunow (Goethe-University Frankfurt)
Attitudinal polarization threatens social cohesion by decreasing trust and increasing protest behavior, particularly among ideological extremists. Most existing studies on polarization in Europe have focused on a single country and examined whether one or all three main types of attitudinal polarization - disagreement, issue alignment, and sorting - have increased or decreased over the last decades. However, this approach provides little insight into whether, and if so, how the extent of attitudinal polarization varies across countries and how different types of polarization relate to each other.
In this study, we address this gap by comparing the three types of attitudinal polarization in 21 EU member states using data from the EVS-2017 survey on five key attitudinal dimensions: social inequality, immigration, EU integration, gender, and the environment. The results show that different types of polarization are more prevalent in certain regions of Europe, rather than occurring uniformly across the continent. Disagreement is more prevalent in Eastern and Southern Europe, while issue alignment and sorting are more common in the North and West. Additionally, immigration is the most polarizing issue across Europe, although disagreement and sorting also occur with respect to social inequality. There is limited evidence of consistently high levels of polarization across all three types in any European country, but there are signs of between-country polarization on issues relating to gender and sexuality, with strong within-country consensus in opposite directions.