Tárki European Social Report 2009 [antikvár]

TÂRKI EUROPEAN SOCIAL REPORT 2009 This book, the second in the series, seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the similarities and differences between the European societies of the enlarged European Union. Unlike TÂRKI's first European Social Report, however, this issue concentrates on "soft" rather than "hard" facts. Whereas the previous edition' focused on demographic, labour market, income distribution and housing characteristics, this book concentrates on the perceptions, opinions and attitudes of Europeans. From the wide range of potential issues we selected those fields that are most relevant to economic activity. People choose, decide and cooperate on the basis of their preferences, and are driven by cultural background, values, traditions and the like. This is the reason for the choice of such topics as attitudes to welfare, trust, risk, self-reliance, opinions on the role of knowledge, conscious consumption, attitudes to getting ahead in society, etc. Ideally, the best source would have been a single, pan-European data set that covers all these issues. However, there is no such single source. Instead, we tried to collect data from different sources that might contain at least some of the relevant questions/variables. Fortunately, there is a wealth of various high-quality data sets that we can pick and choose from. Among these numerous international comparative social science data sets we had the privilege to analyse various waves of the European Social Sun/ey (ESS), the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), the World Values Sun/ey (WVS), the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) and the Eurobarometer (EB).^ These data sets are all the product of carefully designed international research exercises, and have already undergone a detailed harmonization process. Still, the various surveys are not totally consistent with one another, and so we had to invest a great deal of effort in making them so - at least at the level of analysis presented in the various chapters. Part of this harmonization was carried out by TARKI staff, but the authors, too (who represent a good selection of the X^RKI social research network in Hungary), put a great deal of effort into common definitions and understanding ofthe individual variables. Still, this is not a single-authored book: research questions, applied methods and interpretations of the findings reflect various personalities, methodological tastes, etc. However, it is hoped that the current seleaion and connbina-tion of issues, data sets and methods adds a dear value-added to the already existing research on the topics. Though it is hard to summarize the collection in an "executive summary", here we attempt to provide a loose sketch of the main findings: • There is a great deal of heterogeneity in the attitudes of various segments within Europe. Some value clusters reflect different phases of economic development (differentiating between better-off and less well-off countries), regions (East-West-South-Central-North) and political heritage ("old" and "new" member states). • Some of these divisions loosely correlate (such as political divisions or divisions by affluence of nations), but sometimes they are cross-cutting (such as affluence and religious differences, which are particularly relevant in terms of values and attitudes). • Differences in attitude correspond, in some cases, to an East-West division (or, to put it more accurately, between the "old" and the "new" member states of the European Union). This division may be due to the different economic levels of the two blocs of countries, but it may also be due to their divergent political heritage. • In other instances, attitudes seem to be distinguished by a less crude geographical pattern. The chapters in this book seek to identify these differences along geographical lines (differentiating between North, West, South, East and Central Europe) or, alternatively, according to the type of welfare regime: Scandinavian, Angio-Saxon, Mediterranean, post-socialist or Continental. Sometimes the divisions seem to correspond more to religious-territorial divisions, separating Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox denominations. ^ TÂRKI European Social Report 2008,130 pages, downloadable from vww.tarki.hu/en/publications/SR/2008/index l^tml For a short description of the databases used, please see the annex to this book. 10 iNTRODUaiON