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The refugee crisis evidenced a myriad of flaws in the EU common asylum policy, especially the lack of fairness in asylum burden-sharing. This paper reveals that, despite some progress in terms of inequality, a bi-polarised distribution gained ground. Moreover, two novel convergence approaches in this field reveal that the message of previous articles on disparity reduction is incomplete; there was no pure convergence, as it was achieved due to frontrunners, with no role for laggards. Consequently, urgent political action and greater leadership by European institutions are required to pave the way for distributive justice between states in asylum burdens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how political conflict shapes ethnonational identities in contexts where a national group coexists with territorially concentrated ethnic minorities and qualifies the view that conflict polarizes identities. An often overlooked fact is that large numbers of citizens in these contexts identify simultaneously with both groups. Based on the research about cross-pressures, we claim that dual identifiers react differently to conflict than exclusive identifiers. We predict that political disputes harden and polarize identities, but only among citizens at the extremes. Heightened conflict should not alter the identity of dual identifiers, but lead them to withdraw from politics. The setting of our study is Catalonia, a territory with numerous dual identifiers and an intense nonviolent political conflict. Results from two survey experiments, qualitative interviews, and public opinion surveys confirm that heightened political conflict only produces polarization at the extremes, but dual identifiers do not exhibit this reaction. Our findings have implications for policy interventions, as they suggest that strengthening dual identities may assuage the polarizing effects of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nationalist messages that family and school transmit are very often concurrent, making it difficult to measure their independent impact on individuals. In order to separate out the leverage of these two agents of socialisation, this article focuses on a case study in which such concurrence cannot be taken for granted: Catalonia. The article exploits variation in parents' national identification, resulting from the presence of a population born in other regions of Spain outside Catalonia, to tease out the effect of both parents and Catalan school in crafting individuals' identification. The results, which draw on the analysis of a household survey, suggest that more years of schooling makes more likely that individuals develop a dual identity; however, parents' attachment to Catalonia is key in fostering an exclusive identification with Catalonia. Results also suggest that residence in neighbourhoods in which the proportion of natives and immigrants from other regions of Spain favours contact between children from different identity backgrounds is decisive in promoting a more Catalan-oriented identification between second generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish Political Attitudes Panel Dataset (POLAT) is an ongoing panel study carried out in Spain. The present research note introduces the dataset, and presents some results of the first six waves, fielded in political context defined by a prolonged economic recession, major corruption scandals and widespread mass protests (2010-2014). The longitudinal aspect of the dataset allows researchers to trace changes and exploit within-individual variation in a wide array of political, social and economic attitudes and behaviors. The note offers validity checks for some of the key empirical indicators against the benchmark of concurrent surveys, including the European Social Survey. Finally, the note illustrates the potential of POLAT for the analysis of change in political attitudes and behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]