Search

Austerity policies in Europe are disrupting and potentially reversing progress toward gender equality, a core principle of European policy from the mid-1990s onward. Not all EU gender-related policy has been aimed at promoting equality but instead has been associated with reforming the EU social model toward more neoliberal, flexible, and high employment labor markets. In this article, the author assesses these uses and potential abuses of the gender equality agenda in Europe, both before and after the crisis. While the crisis has not reversed the trend toward women's integration into employment, women are facing cuts in employment conditions post crisis, affecting both the higher skilled in the public sector and the lower skilled, attributable to accelerated labor market deregulation. Moreover, the trend toward a new reproductive bargain has been halted with public care services being cut, particularly in member states where services are already limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Values Study (EVS) was first conducted in 1981 and then repeated in 1990, 1999, 2008, and 2017, with the aim of providing researchers with data to investigate whether European individual and social values are changing and to what degree. The EVS is traditionally carried out as a probability-based face-to-face survey that takes around 1 hour to complete. In recent years, large-scale population surveys such as the EVS have been challenged by decreasing response rates and increasing survey costs. In the light of these challenges, six countries that participated in the last wave of the EVS tested the application of self-administered mixed-modes (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland). With the present data brief, we will introduce researchers to the latest wave of the EVS, the implemented mode experiments, and the EVS data releases. In our view, it is pivotal for data use in substantive research to make the reasoning behind design changes and country-specific implementations transparent as well as to highlight new research opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, "Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe" guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the idea that the rise of broadband Internet has contributed to an aggravation of the divide between those who are politically active and those who are not. It was hypothesized that both access to broadband Internet (as an individuallevel characteristic) and broadband penetration (as a country-level characteristic) would strengthen the positive relation between relative preferences for political media content and political participation. Analyses were based on data that were collected in the 2010 wave of the European Social Survey (N = 40,582; 25 countries). Political participation was measured both using a voter turnout variable and using a more general political participation scale. Findings from multilevel analyses provide support to the moderating role of both broadband access and broadband penetration, but only when using the general political participation scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judges and scholars have long debated whether the European Court of Human Rights (the ECtHR or the Court) can only expand, never diminish, human rights protections in Europe. Recent studies have found that political backlashes and national-level restrictions have influenced ECtHR case law. However, analysing whether the ECtHR is shifting in a regressive direction faces an empirical challenge: How can we observe whether the Court is limiting rights over time if it has never expressly overturned a prior judgment in a way that favours the government? We gain traction on this question by analysing all separate and minority opinions of the ECtHR Grand Chamber between 1998 and 2018. We focus on opinions asserting that the Grand Chamber has tacitly overturned prior rulings or settled doctrine in a way that favours the respondent state, which we label as 'walking back dissents'. We find that walking back dissents have become significantly more common in the last decade, revealing that some members of the ECtHR themselves believe that the Grand Chamber is increasingly overturning prior judgments in a regressive direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative research into intergenerational social mobility has been typically restricted to a relatively small number of countries. The aim of this paper is to widen the perspective, and to provide an up-to-date account of rates of intergenerational class mobility across 30 European countries, using a newly-constructed comparative data-set based on the European Social Survey. Absolute mobility rates are found to vary quite widely with national differences in the extent and pattern of class structural change. As regards relative rates, countries are best seen as falling into groups within comparatively high and low fluidity sets, within which groups a high degree of cross-national commonality prevails. Further results indicate that country differences in relative rates play only a very limited part in accounting for country differences in absolute rates, confirming that the latter are primarily determined by class structural change. Based on our findings, we suggest a restatement of the FJH-hypothesis to the effect that in societies with a capitalist market economy, a nuclear family system and a liberal-democratic polity, a limit exists to the extent to which relative rates of class mobility can be equalized, which countries may move closer to or, in the case of post-socialist societies, recede from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the previous scholarship on the historical living arrangements of the aged has taken place without the benefit of large-scale harmonised census microdata and did not embrace even rudimentary forms of spatial modelling. Drawing on the pooled cross-sectional census microdata from the North Atlantic Population and Mosaic projects, we derive measures of intergenerational co-residence among the elderly for 277 regional populations from Catalonia to the Urals during the demographic ancien régime and thereafter. To examine the historical geography of living arrangements among the elderly, the spatial patterns in our data are assessed using formal tools of Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis. To investigate the extent to which the observed regional patterns are attributable to underlying demographic, socio-economic, or environmental variability, we specified a series of the OLS regression models and applied the Local Indicators of Spatial Association to the models' residuals in order to identify the spatial clusters that cannot be explained by the chosen set of predictors. Our findings reveal considerable variability in the living arrangements of the elderly in historic Europe. This variability does not align very neatly with the geographic patterns predicted by earlier historical demographic literature and partly persists even after controlling for contextual factors. Our bottom-line results suggest that when seeking to untangle the dynamics of European family systems, greater spatial awareness is indispensable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a commonplace that the effort to diffuse and disseminate a modern national identity in Europe and elsewhere in no way meant the complete abandonment of earlier local identities. Rather, the champions of the European national movements frequently integrated elements of a country‐based patriotism (Landespatriotismus), enlightened regionalism, and localism. When it comes, however, to the origins of European Zionism, the widespread wisdom is that in this case the component of localism and regionalism in the lands of origin of Diaspora Jews was "out of the question," for there were no concrete geographical or historical ties between their places of residence in the Diaspora and Palestine. The present article aims to contribute to revisiting this opinion, focusing on the Russian‐Jewish author Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940)–a prominent Zionist right‐wing leader, who at one and the same time publicly and forcefully expressed positions of local patriotism regarding his native city of Odessa. Based on hitherto unexplored texts written by Jabotinsky, the article shows that the local attachment to the city of Odessa and to the Southern Ukrainian region of Czarist Empire played in Jabotinsky's Zionism a role comparable to the functioning of the localism and the regionalism in the European nationalisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific knowledge on what works in countering violent extremism remains limited. This article argues that we should move away from the "what works?" question and towards: "what works, for whom, in what circumstances, and how?" This method is also known as realist evaluation. This article applies the realist review method to CVE studies, which synthesizes the existing CVE literature and helps us gain insight into relevant contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes for CVE. Realist reviews help to develop and shape more effective policy and contribute to further CVE theory development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since much of the discussion about Islamophobia has been concerned with positive-self and negative-other representations of Muslims, understanding it as a culturally racist discourse foregrounds the way Muslims are constructed as deeply threatening to the values and identities of the spaces they occupy. These representations invoke an essentialised and determinative Muslim culture that can be understood as the central organising principle of Islamophobia: the belief that relies upon binary oppositions that allow its proponents to advocate a host of positive values, while repudiating and denigrating Muslims. This paper explains how Islamophobia can be conceptualised as the racist discourse that upholds a system of Eurocentric supremacy, a historical development based on the universalising aspects of Western culture that led to the development of a racialised social system in Europe. By demonstrating the form and content of Islamophobic discourse, the paper draws attention to a wide array of issues ranging from the securitisation discourse, institutionalisation of Islamophobia, to its modes of articulation in specific European countries. It further argues that given the rise of racist, especially Islamophobic, far-right parties in European countries, combating Islamophobia becomes an institutional priority that requires outspoken and brave initiatives and persons who not only challenge this pervasive form of racism but also address structural forms of discrimination affecting Muslims or those perceived as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in the social sciences has shown recurrently that life satisfaction varies across countries. More recently, the question was raised whether Europeans are comparing living conditions in European countries, and whether these comparisons are affecting the way they assess their personal situation. The paper uses original survey data from nine European countries in order to answer these questions. We analyze the way European citizens assess the living conditions in the various countries under analysis. And we test whether assessments of other countries are significantly interrelated with reported levels of life satisfaction. Finally, we measure the extent to which these effects hold if other reference groups (friends, neighbors, own country) and individual socio-demographic traits are included in the analysis. Our findings paint a mixed picture. Assessing living conditions in other European countries is widely diffused and attests a marked 'cognitive Europeanization'. However, comparisons with other countries play a less relevant role for reported life satisfaction, when compared to the assessment of the own national economy and the own household situation. Moreover, Switzerland as a non-EU-member is a more significant target than most other EU-members, attesting that we are rather speaking of a European frame of reference, than an EU-related one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains perceived loneliness among people in Europe by accounting for cultural factors as well as social isolation. Culturally, it measures the impact of both personal and societal individualism-collectivism on loneliness. It accounts for social isolation by looking at the separate effects of living alone, emotional isolation, and relational isolation. Using a 2014 European Social Survey sample comprising 36,760 individuals in 21 countries, the study predicts loneliness using multilevel logistic regression modeling using both maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimation procedures. Results indicate that societal individualism may strongly reduce loneliness, even after taking into account that social isolation partially mediates this relationship. Further, the effects of living alone and relational isolation depend upon whether one is personally an individualist or collectivist. Living alone and relational isolation greatly increase loneliness, and such negative effects are somewhat reduced for individualists. However, individualists are not protected from the negative impacts of emotional isolation at all, and the above moderation effects do not hold for the most severe forms of loneliness. Based on this analysis, the best case for reduced loneliness for individualists and collectivists alike is that they maintain a strong degree of multiple forms of social integration and live in an individualist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study was to explore attitudes towards sexuality and sexual behaviour in older adults in Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Portugal. A cross-sectional survey with representative samples of the population aged 60-75 years recruited through phone registers in Norway (676 men and 594 women), Denmark (530 men and 515 women), Belgium (318 men and 672 women), and Portugal (236 men and 273 women) was conducted. The data collection was carried out using an anonymous postal questionnaire. Four dimensions of attitudes towards sexuality were identified: 'sex for love', 'sexual pressure in society', 'sex for well-being', and 'sexual changes and ageing'. Discriminant analyses identified three discriminant attitude functions: sex for well-being, sexual changes due to ageing, and sex for love. Portuguese men had positive attitudes towards sex as good for well-being in older adults but believed ageing was an obstacle to being sexual at this stage of life. Portuguese women believed sex was good for well-being and did not consider ageing an obstacle to sexual enjoyment. Norwegian men and Danish women believed changes in sexuality due to ageing were no obstacle to being sexual but did not believe that sex was good for well-being. The attitudes of Belgian and Danish men were largely inclined in the direction that sex is not particularly important for elderly people and that changes in sexuality occur due to the ageing process. Men and women were committed to the attitude of sex for love, although this was observed most in Belgian participants and least in Danish men. Positive attitudes towards sex for well-being and towards ageing and sexual changes correlated with less change in sexual interest and sexual enjoyment, and with increased frequency of intercourse and masturbation. To tailor successful sexual health interventions, attitudes of sexuality in older people should be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More often than not, assessments of future climate risks are based on future climatic conditions superimposed on current socioeconomic conditions only. The new IPCC-guided alternative global development trends, the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), have the potential to enhance the integration of future socioeconomic conditions—in the form of socioeconomic scenarios—within assessments of future climate risks. Being global development pathways, the SSPs lack regional and sectoral details. To increase their suitability in sectoral and/or regional studies and their relevance for local stakeholders, the SSPs have to be extended. We propose here a new method to extend the SSPs that makes use of existing scenario studies, the (re)use of which has been underestimated so far. Our approach lies in a systematic matching of multiple scenario sets that facilitates enrichment of the global SSPs with regional and sectoral information, in terms of both storylines and quantitative projections. We apply this method to develop extended SSPs of human vulnerability in Europe and to quantify them for a number of key indicators at the sub-national level up to 2050, based on the co-use of the matched scenarios' quantitative outputs. Results show that such a method leads to internally consistent extended SSPs with detailed and highly quantified narratives that are tightly linked to global contexts. This method also provides multiple entry points where the relevance of scenarios to local stakeholders can be tested and strengthened. The extended SSPs can be readily employed to explore future populations' vulnerability to climate hazards under varying levels of socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights information on interconnections between borders and identities of Europe. it mentions several aspects of binary thinking on the refugee crises in Europe includes study of refugee crises as a story about Europe itself that involves complex combination of national identities and supranational institutions; impact of Russia in influencing refugee debate in Europe; and structurally imbalance of the refugee debate.

Presents observations from an editor for `Oslobodenje,' the only daily newspaper operating in Bosnia-Herzegovina on some of the many in Sarajevo who try to live with honor. May 1992 news item that the school year was over and the students' grades will be the same as they were on the first day of war; Children's orthopedic ward at Kosevo Hospital, July 1992; Free bus rides, August 1992; Excerpted from `Nameless Horror' and `The Child Hunt.'

This article reports on mixed-mode methods of data collection in cross-national surveys on social attitudes. The article discusses the European Social Survey (ESS) questionnaire and how it reflects attitudes in 30 European countries. The article describes the ESS as consisting of a core section and two rotating modules on topics such as media consumption, social trust, well-being, and attitudes towards welfare and immigration. Information is also provided on phone and face-to-face interviews, as well as respondents' attitudes.

How are diaspora involvement in peacebuilding and elite cooperation in multi-ethnic municipalities complementary? This article examines how local elites perceive and respond to conflict-generated diaspora’s role in peacebuilding in nine post-conflict multi-ethnic municipalities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and whether these perceptions can determine types of inter-ethnic cooperation within local institutions. Using a systematic comparative case study analysis utilising ideal-type fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), I derive four types of relationships. The results indicate that local elites, experiencing various levels of direct and indirect interaction with diaspora communities, perceive diaspora’s role in the process as constraining their own cooperation prospects. The analysis also demonstrates that local elites perceive diaspora as insufficiently competent and imperfectly coordinated to tackle major challenges in local peacebuilding frameworks and that diaspora actions do not significantly affect the reform of current dynamics and practices of intra-ethnic cooperation among elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of an international comparative study on food self-provisioning, an activity still widespread in the countries of the Global North. We collected the data in a sociological survey done in 2010 as a part of the household energy use research project GILDED. We selected a region with urban and rural areas as a case study in each of the five EU countries, including Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Our article raises two main research questions: (1) What is the level of food self-provisioning in the regions? (2) Who participates in it? Additionally, we inquired into the motivations of self-provisioners using the results of analyses of sociodemographic and food consumption habits for their interpretation. We found that the level of self-provisioning varies considerably among the regions. Its share ranges from 13 percent in Dutch urban areas to 58 percent in German rural areas. The effects of some sociodemographic and geographic factors differ significantly among the countries. However, we can summarize that living in one's own property, living in a house or in a rural area, having a partner or children, being retired, or having a low income increases the probability of food self-provisioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars interested in the relationship between social context and health have recently turned attention further "upstream" to understand how political, social, and economic institutions shape the distribution of life chances across contexts. We compare minority health inequalities across 22 European countries ( N = 199,981) to investigate how two such arrangements-welfare state effort and immigrant incorporation policies-influence the distribution of health and health inequalities. We examine two measures of health from seven waves of the European Social Survey. Results from a series of multilevel mixed-effects models show that minority health inequalities vary across contexts and persist after accounting for socioeconomic differences. Cross-level interaction results show that welfare state effort is associated with better health for all groups but is unrelated to levels of inequality between groups. In contrast, policies aimed at protecting minorities from discrimination correlate with smaller relative health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion in postconflict societies toward international missions is widely believed to be important. We offer a theory that local satisfaction critically depends on an individual’s perception of whether the mission is furthering the wartime political agenda of his or her social group. To test this theory and competing hypotheses, we examine Kosovo Albanian satisfaction with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). We use data from seventeen different representative surveys conducted in Kosovo from 2002 to 2007 as well as focus group and other primary and secondary sources. Consistent with our theory, we find that aggregate satisfaction over time reflected UNMIK’s growing acceptance of Kosovo’s independence and individuals with more radical views tended to be less satisfied with UNMIK. Our analysis implies that missions can achieve greater local satisfaction by doing what is possible to be responsive to, or at a minimum recognize, the wartime political agendas of the key social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale is the property of Berghahn Books and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: This article calls attention to the personal accounts kept by Florentines for their private affairs. Well over a thousand of these documents survive from the late fourteenth century onwards, and they constitute a source that for the early period probably has no equal for any other city in Europe. Kept according to the highest standards of accounting practice at the time, these accounts document the personal activity of Florentines in the marketplace outside the sphere of their business interests, an area barely adumbrated in the literature on the economic and social history of the city. Of the several functions this activity served, this article concentrates exclusively on just one: the household economy. It explores this subject through a survey of several hundred such accounts with the objective of bringing this source into the extensive literature in Florentine studies on the family, material culture and the economy in general. The discussion emphasizes the importance of change across time and touches on the wider issue of the cultural significance of the accounting practice that brought these documents into existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a new, growing subset of the literature argues that armed conflict does not necessarily erode social cohesion in the postwar era, we challenge this perspective and examine how civil war experiences shape social trust in Kosovo after the war from 1998 to 1999. Based on a nationwide survey conducted in 2010 and the disaggregated conflict event data set of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, we simultaneously analyze the impact of individual war-related experiences and exposure to war in the community through hierarchical analyses of twenty-six municipalities. Our findings confirm that civil war is negatively related to social trust. This effect proves to be more conclusive for individual war experiences than for contextual war exposure. Arguably, the occurrence of instances of violence with lasting psychological as well as social structural consequences provides people with clear evidence of the untrustworthiness, uncooperativeness, and hostility of others, diminishing social trust in the aftermath of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty-five years after the fall of the communist regimes, the gender gap in employment varies widely across Central and Eastern Europe. This study examines the societal-level reasons for this variation and assesses the impact of different dimensions of neoliberally minded "economic development" strategies on gender inequality. We focus on Central and Eastern Europe, a segment of the world not typically addressed in the literature on gender and development. We rely on the 2008 and 2012 waves of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey as well as multiple macro-level data sources to analyze the association between development indicators, labor market context, social policy arrangements, and the gender employment gap. We find that typical growth indicators, global market integration, and social policy arrangements are not at all or only weakly associated with the gender employment gap in this region. Instead, the labor market context, specifically the degree of segregation and the size of the public and service sectors, are more important for shaping women's labor market opportunities relative to men's at both time points. Our findings contribute to the literature on the trade-offs between job segregation and aspects of gender inequality as well as to ongoing debates within the field of "gender and development" by pointing out important variations across regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Following the seminal work of Richard Titmuss, who coined the term occupational welfare (OW) 60 years ago, the article approaches OW provision in Europe today. We first define OW as the sum of extra‐statutory social benefits and services provided by employers and/or trade unions as a result of employment. We then look at its recent evolution: OW expenditure and coverage have been increasing significantly in Europe since the 1990s. While pensions are still the main policy area of OW, the latter has also advanced in other social protection areas (e.g., health insurance, reconciliation). This has led to four different ideal types of OW—defined on the base of their organizing principle (voluntarism vs. collectivism) and the level of OW scheme coverage and expenditure. By looking at the main drivers of OW, the analysis has found no evidence of a “crowding out” effect between public welfare and OW. Collective bargaining, national political economy, and the timing of reforms prove to be important factors explaining the OW development. As for the present and future of OW, dualization is a major risk. At present, the main fault lines created by OW follow sectoral, industry, company size, and occupational group lines. To avoid the worsening of inequalities originated by OW, even in those countries which were able in the past to avoid dualization, strong industrial relations may play a key role. The article concludes with some suggestions on the agenda of future OW research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2013, a breakdown in the routine functioning of state bureaucracy sparked the largest and up to that point most signifi cant wave of protests in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, named the Bosnian Babylution. Th e protest centered on the plight of newborn babies who, because of this particular administrative problem, could no longer be issued key documents, even to travel outside the country for life-saving medical care. Th ese events exposed the profound nature of the representational crisis gripping this postwar, postsocialist and postintervention state that has emerged at the intersection of ethnic hyper-representation and the lived experience of the collapse of biopolitical care. Yet, as this analysis shows, this crisis has also helped unleash new forms of political desire for revolutionary rupture and reconstitution of the postwar political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show evidence of the divergence of welfare outcomes in the European Union (EU) during the economic crisis, which made the European social model fail, and the convergence among European countries halt. This study reviews Sapir’s model for classifying European welfare state systems and adapts it to the new reality, taking into account Europe 2020 targets on poverty reduction and employment growth.Design/methodology/approach Two variables are used in the application of Sapir’s graphical analysis to European social models: the employment rate as efficiency indicator, and the people At Risk Of Poverty and/or Exclusion rate as equity indicator. Both efficiency and equity are present in Europe 2020 targets. In addition, a cluster analysis is applied.Findings The division of EU member states into four geopolitical social models has proved to be dynamic, changing in the period under analysis. As a consequence of the economic crisis and the fiscal consolidation, efficiency and equity levels across the EU are polarised between the Mediterranean and the Nordic models.Originality/value This paper shows the effects of the economic crisis in the EU, analysing the evolution between 2008 and 2014, and incorporating Eastern Europe new member states into the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, to meet people's needs in daily life for drinking water, many companies provide bottled drinking water. As this industry grows and more competition occurs, the companies should know the aspects that influence people to buy the products that are bottled drinking water. Although this increase in several bottled water producers can be attributed to market demand and technology modernization, the fact that consumers migrate from one brand to another is significant and indicates that there are factors that affect the consumer's decision when choosing the bottled water brand. The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze the factors that influence consumers the most when choosing a bottled water brand in the market, using Kosovo as a case study. To define factors based on the consumer's preferences and valuations of the importance, the principal component analysis was applied based on a correlation matrix, using a component extraction method with a varimax rotation and a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin adequacy test. The findings show that the consumer's decision is influenced mostly by six key factors, namely quality, marketing, consumer perception, price, preference and practicality. The research provides new insights into the bottled water manufacturing industry and marketers in positioning themselves in a competitive environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: We aimed to examine the associations of both objectively assessed and perceived physical and social neighborhood characteristics with happiness in European adults. In addition, we aimed to study how these associations differed among subgroups. Methods: Participants (N = 6037) of the cross-sectional SPOTLIGHT survey reported on their level of happiness using a 5-point Likert scale, and on perceived physical and social environmental neighborhood characteristics. Objective physical environmental characteristics were assessed using a Google Street View-based neighborhood audit. Associations of 14 physical and social environmental characteristics with happiness were analyzed using multivariable multinomial regression analyses with clustered standard errors. Results: Living in neighborhoods with higher levels of aesthetics and more water and green space was associated with being very happy. Individuals who perceived their neighborhood to be safer, more functional and more aesthetic were more likely to be very happy. The associations of functionality and aesthetics with happiness were strongest in the Ghent region (Belgium), the Randstad (the Netherlands) and Greater London (United Kingdom). Perceived absence of air pollution was only associated with higher levels of happiness in more highly educated participants. Individuals with a larger social network, more social cohesion and who trusted their neighbors were more likely to be very happy. The association between social networks and happiness was somewhat stronger in men than in women. In general, the associations between environmental characteristics and happiness had similar directions and sizes across socio-economic and socio-demographic subgroups. Conclusions: This European study provided evidence that both objectively assessed and perceived physical and social characteristics of the neighborhood environment are associated with the happiness of its residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the intimate relationship of Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti and poet Vittoria Colonna. Topics discussed include a look at the seven autograph letters and two artworks exchanged between the pair, notions of meditation, introspection and spirituality, and an examination of spirituality and friendship in 16th century Europe.

Routinely, people, who have, over the past five years, travelled to Western Asia to settle, are being referred to, in the Western popular discourse, as 'foreign fighters'. Though, admittedly, many among them did join various armed groups, a rather significant part of them did not or even could not have become members of armed groups. This is first of all true of children who travelled with their parents but also young females, in the Western popular parlance pejoratively called 'jihadi brides'. However, even these categories aside, those (young) men who did join armed groups in Syria and Iraq, though they may be identified as 'fighters', may also not be regarded (and certainly many among them do not see themselves) as 'foreign'. As the overwhelming number of people who travelled to West Asia joined the Islamic Khilafa State (IKS), their status in the entity is more of 'naturalized citizens', whose naturalization process is epitomized in the joining of the armed forces of the Islamic Khilafa State. Those, who did not (or could not) join the IKS armed forces, became citizens through pledging allegiance to the khalifa (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) and by performing what they themselves regard as compulsory hijra - relocation from the lands of unbelief to the land of Islam under the declared khilafa. The khilafa project initiated by the Islamic State is a unique phenomenon, not only from the point of view of the theories of international relations but also in respect to the classical notions of state formation and nation building, and puts the conceptualization of citizenship in a new light. As such, it poses new challenges not only from the perspective of narrow military security but also from a much broader one, particularly, to the countries, among them European, the citizens of which forsake their original social contracts for a new one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Roma population, with approximately 10 million people, is the largest minority of Europe. Since the end of the communist era in Eastern Europe, mass emigration has occurred, mainly to Western Europe. Today across Western Europe the Roma still face huge problems in regard of discrimination and exclusion. A general change in the way they are perceived is necessary. In the last years, the European Union have put the Roma questions on the forefront of their discussions. Nevertheless, the situation of the minority is still very precarious and demands more concrete research and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The migration subject from the countries of North Africa and the Middle East to Europe was one of the main subjects of 2015-2016 on the Russian television, in particular, in information programs. In the real research we also explore the period from May 15 to May 22, 2017 with the purpose of tracking the appeal of journalists to this subject a year later after its active lighting in world media. At the same time the analysis of speech dynamics changes in texts of information programs on the basis of which conclusions on this research were drawn became a main objective. Let us note that several scientific approaches to a research of the television speech are known: lingual-and-stylistic, social-and-linguistic, psycho-linguistic, culturological, structural, system, functional approaches. In literature are in this regard described also effect of priming and cultivation. Besides, the new information era and a variety of information sources led to information overload which became a studying subject for representatives of cognitive sciences. Language and stylistic features of the television speech on an immigration subject in the real research are considered as a telespeech implementer in communication aspect. The research of its internal linguistic component, including phonetic implementers, became a basis of their studying. Results of the research conducted on the basis of the Kazan Federal University are given in the article. The author shows two-year speech dynamics changes in plots of information releases of the central TV channels with the universal programming strategy concerning a subject of mass migration to Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Survey data are often used to map cultural diversity by aggregating scores of attitude and value items across countries. However, this procedure only makes sense if the same concept is measured in all countries. In this study we argue that when (co)variances among sets of items are similar across countries, these countries share a common way of assigning meaning to the items. Clusters of cultures can then be observed by doing a cluster analysis on the (co)variance matrices of sets of related items. This study focuses on family values and gender role attitudes. We find four clusters of cultures that assign a distinct meaning to these items, especially in the case of gender roles. Some of these differences reflect response style behavior in the form of acquiescence. Adjusting for this style effect impacts on country comparisons hence demonstrating the usefulness of investigating the patterns of meaning given to sets of items prior to aggregating scores into cultural characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares participation in different forms of political action between natives, immigrants and non-citizen immigrants using data from thirteen European countries across six waves of the European Social Survey. The authors highlight problems associated with previous categorizations of political action, and find that when political action is disaggregated and relative participation between groups is examined, that immigrants' patterns of participation are not substantially different from those of natives. When comparing citizen immigrants to non-citizen immigrants, previous research has suggested that citizenship acts as a "ticket" to non-institutional, unconventional, confrontational forms of political action. The authors' findings instead suggest a more complicated relationship between immigrant/citizenship status and preferences for political action since citizenship may facilitate participation in both so-called institutional and extra-institutional activities depending on the context of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Economic History Research / Investigaciones de Historia Económica is the property of Asociacion Espanola de Historia Economica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)