Omstreden instituties: Instellingen in een geindividualiseerde samenleving

Although today's western societies are commonly characterized as highly individualized, two institutional consequences have hardly been addressed yet. They are therefor the focus of this issue of the Sociologisch Gids. First, it is studied how political parties and churches, two former 'peak institutions' that almost by themselves used to control an entire life domain, adjust to the newly emerged circumstances. Second, it is studied what behavioral patterns emerge within the political and religious domains to fill the void left by the decline of those peak institutions. By way of introduction to the four papers that address those two questions for the Low Countries, this introduction discusses the principal changes that have occured within both realms and the moral controversies that institutional decline and change inevitably gives rise to

Extending trust to immigrants: Generalized trust, cross-group friendship and anti-immigrant sentiments in 21 European societies.

The aim of this study is twofold. First, we expand on the literature by testing whether generalized trust is negatively related to anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe. Second, we examine to what extent the relation between generalized trust and anti-immigrant sentiments is dependent upon cross-group friendships. We apply multilevel linear regression modeling to representative survey data enriched with levels of ethnic diversity covering 21 European countries. Results show that both generalized trust and cross-group friendship are negatively related to anti-immigrant sentiments. However, there is a negligible positive relation between generalized trust and cross-group friendship (r = .10), and we can clearly observe that they operate independently from one another. Hence, trusting actors are not more likely to form more cross-group friendships, and cross-group friendship do not lead to the development of more generalized trust. Instead, the findings show that generalized trust leads immigrants too to be included in the radius of trusted others and, as a consequence, the benign effects of generalized trust apply to them as well. We conclude that the strength of generalized trust is a form of generalization, beyond the confines of individual variations in intergroup experiences

Will We All Hunker Down? The Impact of Immigration and Diversity on Local Communities in Spain

This article engages with the scholarly debate on the supposed negative effect of immigration and diversity, and analyses its effect on two different forms of trust - community trust and generalized trust - in Spain. Our contribution is twofold. Firstly, with census section level data of representative samples of all the Spanish municipalities, we test the propositions that relate greater ethnic diversity to social trust. Secondly, we address the limitations intrinsic to the crude measurement of diversity of the Herfindahl index with a systematic consideration of multiple alternative indicators of immigration-related diversity. We find evidence of a negative effect of diversity on community trust but none on generalized trust. Hence, our findings lend some support to the recent scholarship that questions that increasing diversity has a ‘hunkering down’ effect

Technocratic attitudes: a citizens’ perspective of expert decision-making

Despite repeated appointments of technocratic governments in Europe and increasing interest in technocracy, there is little knowledge regarding citizens’ attitudes towards technocracy and the idea of governance by unelected experts. This article revisits normative debates and hypothesises that technocracy and democracy stand in a negative relationship in the eyes of European citizens. It tests this alongside a series of hypotheses on technocratic attitudes combining country-level institutional characteristics with individual survey data. While findings confirm that individual beliefs about the merits of democracy influence technocratic attitudes, two additional important factors are also identified: first, levels of trust in current representative political institutions also motivate technocratic preferences; second, historical legacies, in terms of past party-based authoritarian regime experience, can explain significant cross-national variation. The implications of the findings are discussed in the broader context of citizen orientations towards government, elitism and the mounting challenges facing representative democracy

Politics in the supermarket : political consumerism as a form of political participation

Both anecdotal and case-study evidence have long suggested that consumer behavior such as the buying or boycotting of products and services for political and ethical reasons can take on political significance. Despite recent claims that such behavior has become more widespread in recent years, political consumerism has not been studied systematically in survey research on political participation. Through the use of a pilot survey conducted among 1015 Canadian, Belgian, and Swedish students, we ascertain whether political consumerism is a sufficiently consistent behavioral pattern to be measured and studied meaningfully. The data from this pilot survey allow us to build a "political consumerism index" incorporating attitudinal, behavioral, and frequency measurements. Our analysis of this cross-national student sample suggests that political consumerism is primarily a tool of those who are distrustful of political institutions. However, political consumers have more trust in other citizens, and they are disproportionately involved in checkbook organizations. They also tend to score highly on measures of political efficacy and post-materialism. We strongly suggest including measurements of political consumerism together with other emerging forms of activism in future population surveys on political participation. © 2005 International Political Science Association.status: publishe