Frozen or malleable? Political ideology in the face of job loss and unemployment

To what degree do people adjust their political ideology in response to job loss? To answer this question, we draw on Dutch panel data over the period 2007-2016, paying special attention to the potential moderating role of various personal circumstances. We find that, on average, job loss triggers a leftward ideological response. Although small in size, this shock effect persists when people remain unemployed or find new employment, yet in the longer run it wears off. Furthermore, we find that job loss prompts a bigger shift to the left when people are simultaneously confronted with a major drop in household income, when they have fewer financial resources to serve as a buffer, and when they are more pessimistic about the economy. While we also observe many people who revise their ideology to the right during our study window, these rightward shifts do not seem driven by job loss experiences

The impact of religious involvement on trust, volunteering, and perceived cooperativeness: evidence from two British panels

Does religious involvement make people more trusting and prosocial? Considering conflicting theories and mixed prior evidence, we subject this question to a stringent test using large-scale, representative data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991–2009, N ≈ 26,000) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009–2021, N ≈ 80,000). We employ cross-lagged panel models with individual fixed effects to account for time-invariant confounders and reverse causality—two issues that have haunted earlier research. We find that frequency of religious service attendance on average has a positive impact on generalized trust, volunteering, and perceived cooperativeness. Other indicators of religious involvement have weaker effects. We also find variation across religious traditions: the effects of religious attendance are mostly positive for Anglicans and other Protestants, but weaker and mostly statistically insignificant for Catholics, Hindus, and the unaffiliated, and even negative for Muslims when the outcome is perceived cooperativeness. Our findings are robust to alternative model set-ups and hold up after accounting for neighbourhood religious composition, respondent and interviewer ethnicity, and other potential moderators and confounders. Altogether, our study shows that religious involvement can foster prosocial behaviours and attitudes, although in our study this effect is largely restricted to religious service attendance and majority religions

The climate crisis: what sociology can contribute

Climate change provides a major challenge to contemporary societies. Whether the problem is best portrayed as our house being on fire (Thunberg 2019) or as our house being imperceptibly eaten away by dry rot, there is little doubt that we do indeed have a problem. Global temperatures have risen substantially, and heatwaves, hurricanes, floods, and droughts have become increasingly common. There is overwhelming evidence that these trends are, at least for a large part, caused by human activity, with increases in greenhouse gas emissions being the prime culprit (IPCC 2015). According to some analysts, we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a global geological force in its own right (Steffen et al. 2011)

A bridge too far? Volunteering, voluntary associations, and social cohesion

In this thesis, I seek to advance our knowledge about the factors that make people start and stop volunteer work, thus shedding light on the capacity of volunteering and voluntary associations to foster social cohesion. In particular, my goal is twofold: first, to reveal to what extent voluntary associations function as meeting places for people from different social backgrounds, and second, to assess the resilience of civic participation in the face of labor market experiences that might undermine such engagement. I make three core contributions to the literature on voluntary association involvement. First, I pay special attention to the organizational contexts in which volunteers are embedded. Second, I adopt a dynamic approach, analyzing decisions to start and stop volunteering. Third, I attempt to disentangle alternative mechanisms that could drive the associations observed between volunteering and its potential determinants. Analyzing data from The Netherlands and the United States, my findings expose limits to the integrative capacity of voluntary association involvement. As it turns out, the civic landscape is strongly segregated. People tend to sort into voluntary associations where they mostly meet people with similar characteristics as themselves. Such sorting occurs along multiple social dimensions, including educational attainment, religiosity, gender, and ethnicity. This constrains the opportunities for building relationships that cut across existing social boundaries. Indeed, these sorting processes can reproduce in the civic domain fault lines that dominate other spheres of life. Furthermore, civic engagement and participation in the labor market are shown to be strongly intertwined, with the former breaking down when labor force exits occur. Voluntary association involvement is, therefore, of limited value for drawing labor force outsiders into public life. However, this chain of events does not necessarily unfold, as long as labor force outsiders retain aspirations to participate in social life.</p

A bridge too far? Volunteering, voluntary associations, and social cohesion

In this thesis, I seek to advance our knowledge about the factors that make people start and stop volunteer work, thus shedding light on the capacity of volunteering and voluntary associations to foster social cohesion. In particular, my goal is twofold: first, to reveal to what extent voluntary associations function as meeting places for people from different social backgrounds, and second, to assess the resilience of civic participation in the face of labor market experiences that might undermine such engagement. I make three core contributions to the literature on voluntary association involvement. First, I pay special attention to the organizational contexts in which volunteers are embedded. Second, I adopt a dynamic approach, analyzing decisions to start and stop volunteering. Third, I attempt to disentangle alternative mechanisms that could drive the associations observed between volunteering and its potential determinants. Analyzing data from The Netherlands and the United States, my findings expose limits to the integrative capacity of voluntary association involvement. As it turns out, the civic landscape is strongly segregated. People tend to sort into voluntary associations where they mostly meet people with similar characteristics as themselves. Such sorting occurs along multiple social dimensions, including educational attainment, religiosity, gender, and ethnicity. This constrains the opportunities for building relationships that cut across existing social boundaries. Indeed, these sorting processes can reproduce in the civic domain fault lines that dominate other spheres of life. Furthermore, civic engagement and participation in the labor market are shown to be strongly intertwined, with the former breaking down when labor force exits occur. Voluntary association involvement is, therefore, of limited value for drawing labor force outsiders into public life. However, this chain of events does not necessarily unfold, as long as labor force outsiders retain aspirations to participate in social life.</p

Frozen or malleable? Political ideology in the face of job loss and unemployment

Includes supplementary materials for the online appendix.To what degree do people adjust their political ideology in response to job loss? To answer this question, we draw on Dutch panel data over the period 2007–2016, paying special attention to the potential moderating role of various personal circumstances. We find that, on average, job loss triggers a leftward ideological response. Although small in size, this shock effect persists when people remain unemployed or find new employment, yet in the longer run it wears off. Furthermore, we find that job loss prompts a bigger shift to the left when people are simultaneously confronted with a major drop in household income, when they have fewer financial resources to serve as a buffer, and when they are more pessimistic about the economy. While we also observe many people who revise their ideology to the right during our study window, these rightward shifts do not seem driven by job loss experiences

Segregation in Civic Life

To what extent do voluntary organizations like sports, leisure, and neighborhood associations provide a platform where ethnic groups mingle and ethnic boundaries are overcome? This study uses unique panel data from the Netherlands Longitudinal Life Course Study (NELLS) to shed light on the integrative power of voluntary associations. I investigate decisions to join and leave associations of different ethnic composition, as a member or a volunteer, among individuals of Turkish, Moroccan, and native Dutch origin. In general, all ethnic groups are equally likely to join voluntary organizations, but ethnic minorities are more likely to leave than are Dutch natives, even after accounting for relevant sociodemographic characteristics. This alone explains ethnic minorities’ lower involvement rates. Moreover, joining decisions are characterized by strong ethnic sorting across organizations of different ethnic composition: people are much more likely to join associations containing fewer ethnic out-group members. This limits the potential of voluntary associations as pathways to social integration. In contrast, once the initial hurdle of getting involved has been taken, people are no more likely to disengage from organizations with more ethnic out-group members. Inter-ethnic neighborhood contact and the local supply of involvement opportunities are most influential in explaining the strong sorting tendencies in people’s joining decisions