The demographic echo of war and social mobility in Russia

Defence date: 11 June 2019Examining Board: Prof. Fabrizio Bernardi, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof. Juho Härkönen, European University Institute; Prof. Theodore P. Gerber, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Prof. Jan O. Jonsson, Nuffield College, University of Oxford / Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm UniversityRecurring variations in cohort size (also known as ‘baby booms’ and ‘baby busts’) are known to be a factor affecting the fortunes of people born to different cohorts. However, existing evidence in this regard comes overwhelmingly from Western countries, while little is known about the impact of similar processes in Russia despite the fact it is the country in which the Second World War has left, perhaps, the most sizeable and far-reaching demographic trace. Apart from immense casualties and devastating effects on the health of the surviving population, it had a major impact on the fertility of several generations that sent ripples through Russia’s population age structure for years to come – the phenomenon that Russian demographers metaphorically refer to as the ‘demographic echo of war’. In this study, I explore the effects of this peculiar demographic context on individual social mobility both during the Soviet and the post-Soviet period, using rich data from the Max Planck Education and Employment Survey and Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. In general, I find that the demographic echo of war affected the individual mobility patterns of Russians in several intricate ways, although the magnitude of its impact does not warrant the conclusion that it had a decisive effect on people’s fortunes. The study also makes several theoretical contributions to existing scholarship on the relationship between changes in population age structure and the process of social stratification

Discovering Real (Homogenous) Social Groups in the Russian Society: Methods and Results

The article focuses on the problem of identifying real social groups in the contemporary Russian society. The data from all-Russian monitoring surveys are used to compare two social structure models obtained by alternative methods. One of the models is similar to that of the European sociological tradition based on a socio-professional classification. The other one has been obtained by applying the cluster analysis after having ranked the stratification criteria derived from the entropy analysis.stratification; social structure; social inequality; occupational classification; entropy analysis; cluster analysis; real social groups

The Demographic Echo of War and educational attainment in Soviet Russia

Background: Research on Western countries has shown that birth cohort size is negatively related to educational attainment. It has offered complementary interpretations of this association - optimal schooling choices versus cohort overcrowding effects - that are difficult to resolve empirically. Objective: To investigate birth cohort size effects on educational attainment taking shape primarily in the context of a socialist society that does not lend itself well to "optimal schooling" interpretations. Methods: I exploit birth cohort size variation generated by the Second World War, a phenomenon known as the Demographic War Echo. Using the Education and Employment Survey for Russia and growth curve modeling, I analyze educational trajectories between ages 18 and 35 among Russian men and women born 1950-1987. Results: Larger cohorts attained less schooling and advanced more slowly in their educational careers. They could partly make up for the disadvantage by studying longer and retreating to part-time education. The disadvantage was larger for women because for men it was partly compensated through a decreased probability of military conscription. Conclusions: Larger birth cohort size disadvantaged young Russians in the process of educational attainment. Given the context, this can be attributed entirely to cohort overcrowding effects. Contribution: This is the first examination of birth cohort size effects on educational attainment in a state socialist context. It is also the first to model these effects on educational trajectories rather than simply attainment and to explore the moderating role of part-time education

Revisiting the historical trend of educational stratification in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

Previous research found that social inequality in educational attainment in Russia was invariant to the changes in the socio-political and economic context. It was a striking conclusion when judged against the narratives of the educational policy reforms, the demographic change, and the radical regime change in the early 1990s, all of which suggest that inequalities may have been affected to a non-trivial extent. We hypothesize that the failure to identify corresponding changes has to do with an insufficiently small statistical power of previous analyses and specific inference strategies. By pooling and analyzing relevant harmonizable data from multiple sources, we identify previously overlooked details in the long-term trend of inequality of educational opportunity in Russia, such as (a) a heightened level of inequality in the cohorts that received education during Stalin's era; (b) some success of Khrushchev's reforms that aimed to equalize access to higher education by introducing mechanisms (e. g., university quotas) explicitly favoring students with the rural and working-class origin; (c) the return towards more elitist trends following the reversal of Khrushchev's reforms during Brezhnev's era; (d) modest equalization in the final phase of state socialism under Gorbachev sustained until the first years after market transition in the 1990s. As far as the general trend is concerned, we find that inequality continuously declined from the early Soviet cohorts to the post-Soviet ones, which seems to be consistent with the theoretical and empirical arguments that link educational expansion to the equalization of educational opportunity

The effect of COVID-19 confinement and economic support measures on the mental health of older population in Europe and Israel

This study focuses on the impact of confinement and economic support measures on the mental health of the older population (aged 50 and above) across twenty-five European countries and Israel. While studies evaluating the effect of confinement measures on mental health exist, they largely ignore the potentially offsetting effects of economic support measures. Moreover, previous findings on the effect of confinement measures are inconsistent, and many studies are based solely on cross-sectional designs. Using data from the Corona Survey wave (2020) of the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we leverage the date of interview information to vary individual exposure to different policy contexts within countries. Overall, we do not find support for the negative effect of confinement measures on older adults’ mental health. If anything, both confinement and support measures worked in tandem to soothe mental distress, resulting from the pandemic. The confinement effects, however, are contingent on age, potentially indicating that younger people are more likely to be negatively affected by lockdowns

Slipping past the test : heterogeneous effects of social background in the context of inconsistent selection mechanisms in higher education

First published online: May 28, 2018In this article, we analyze how the existence of alternative pathways to higher education, which implies different selection mechanisms, shapes social inequality in educational attainment. We focus on the Russian educational system, in which higher education can be accessed from academic and vocational tracks, but the rules of admission to higher education from these tracks are different. Access through the academic track is highly selective due to obligatory high-stakes testing, which determines secondary-school graduates’ eligibility to pursue higher education. The vocational track is generally less selective with regard to student intake and provides less restrictive access to higher education. We argue that this system has nuanced implications for social inequality. On one hand, transitions from vocational education to higher education can promote greater social mobility by offering an affordable and low-risk gateway to higher education for children from less-advantaged families. On the other hand, more-advantaged families might use the vocational track to higher education if their children face a high risk of failure in the more selective academic track. We test this conjecture and provide supporting evidence using data from the longitudinal survey Trajectories in Education and Careers.Financial support of the European Research Council through the Advanced Grant awarded to Hans-Peter Blossfeld (Call details ERC-2010-AdG, SH2, Project-ID 269568) and the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow