Determinants of growth in OECD countries revisited

Abstract Drawing on recent developments in the determinant

Values and emotionality in Greek political culture: a study of ressentiment

In this article, we provide a theoretical discussion of ressentiment within the emerging fields of the political sociology and political psychology of emotions and offer an empirical investigation of its political-cultural function. The complex emotion of ressentiment refers to a recurrent rumination on negative feelings and an affective compensation for life failures. Extant studies show ressentiment can be linked to electoral support for populist, anti-immigration and far-right parties, and can provide leverage for major sociopolitical upheavals. Using the World Values Survey 7th wave dataset for Greece we analyse the psychological components and political expressions of ressentiment testing three hypotheses on its relationship with efficacy and life satisfaction, value systems and political violence. The analysis is possible due to an original six-item ressentiment scale that we offer as a novel measure of this emotional phenomenon. We find a limited distribution of ressentiment in Greece concentrated among economically and socially disadvantaged segments of society. We also find that ressentiment scores link monotonically with overall life dissatisfaction and diminished political interest, lack of efficacy, low interpersonal trust and aversion for sociocentric and emancipative values. Traces of dormant support for violence are evident in responses about violence against others where ressentiment-ful participants score higher compared with their less ressentiment-ful counterparts. We discuss the implications of our findings for the quality of democracy, authoritarian populism and nationalism.</p

Retrospective explanation of older women's lifetime work involvement: Individual paths around social norms

This paper uses the retrospective questionnaire of the SHARE survey of Europeans aged 50+ to document the career dilemmas faced by women in Europe over the last fifty years. It charts how social transformation was directly experienced by survey respondents: First, it documents career differences of two cohorts in four geographical regions. Second, it compares outcomes faced by career women who had 'gone against the flow' in countries where they were in a minority, with women who had taken the same decision where career was, already, a majority choice. Third, it examines how far individual career choice was affected by the operation of the welfare state. To do that, we employ a multivariate econometric model that treats entry into the labour market and career choice as linked decisions, which are affected by individual circumstances, macroeconomic conditions but also by social policy parameters. We conclude that the same degree of past social policy effort appears to operate differently in different places. This is broadly consistent with the existence of distinct kinds of welfare state in the different parts of Europe. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Values in Crisis International (SUF edition)

Full edition for scientific use. The COVID-19 crisis is manifold and poses major health, economic and social challenges for current societies. Long-term monitoring of central values and attitudes of citizens in times of crises help to grasp current social and political tensions. Taking this ambition to the global scale and providing comparable data across nations is the main aim of the Values in Crisis Study (VIC). Christian Welzel, together with well-known researchers in Germany, UK and Sweden initiated the study and finally 18 countries collaborated in this project. Currently, the Values in Crisis (VIC) Survey is by our knowledge the only international longitudinal survey project on attitudes and values providing data on a global scale. The international dataset is available as a compact version including mainly the harmonized variables of education, income, and region, the key variables of the survey and scales referring to classical value concepts or personality factors. Additionally, there is a full version, where country-specific questions deviating from the standard questionnaire are available for further single country analysis. A method report is additionally published to provide more insights about the country-specific details of the surveys. This dataset represents the data of 18 countries of the first wave of this longitudinal study which is now made publicly available by the SSÖ-Team and AUSSDA. Further releases of the second wave of the survey “end at sight” which is conducted in 2021 and the third wave of the survey (“after the crisis”, probably in 2022) are planned in the future