Persistent Ambivalence: Theorizing Queer East German Studies

ABSTRACT

The German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany) had an ambivalent relationship with homosexuality. Under the principles of socialism, everyone was welcome to contribute to the greater good. The situation for queer people, here lesbians and gay men, was different: one of illegality and invisibility. A difficulty in analyzing these experiences is the theory and methodology necessary to find them and draw them together in a historical narrative. This essay offers a mode of analysis in which theories of affect illustrate long-term trends in East German conceptualizations of same-sex sexuality. By discussing a 1950 court ruling and a 1989 film, the essay demonstrates the persistence of homophobic prejudice and fear of homosexual seduction of young people and the links to historical and legal developments.     

Activity Spaces,Biographies, Social Networks and their Welfare Gains and Externalities: Some Hypotheses and Empirical Results

The repeated interactions and exchanges in formal and informal networks, e.g. family, firms, associations, friendship circles, regulars of a bar, are central to our daily life. There is no reason to assume that the geography of the members of the networks, to which one belongs, has not been affected by the seminal drop in transport and telecommunication costs since 1950. The article will develop a conceptualisation of the dynamics of the interaction between the geographies of the social networks and of activity space growth. Against this background more detailed, testable hypotheses about the change of the geographies, of the contact intensity distributions and numbers of contacts will be derived. The hypotheses will be illustrated with results from a number of surveys, in which first attempts have been undertaken to obtain the necessary data to test the hypotheses. The final section will discuss the impact of the hypotheses, if found to be true, on both transport modelling and transport policy.     

Changes in Social Trust: Evidence from East German Migrants

Social Indicators Research - Using three waves of the Germany's individual-level panel data, this paper analyses whether there are any changes in the trust levels of East German migrants who...     

Heterogeneity in Trajectories of Life Satisfaction After Reunification: The Role of Individual Resources and Life Stage in Former East Germany

Social Indicators Research - For people living in the former East Germany, reunification with the former West Germany fundamentally transformed the sociopolitical system and most domains of...     

Applied social reporting: A social indicators system for West German Society

This paper presents a ‘system’, i.e. systematic compilation, of about 200 social indicators in 10 areas of life, for the Federal Republic of Germany, 1955–1975. The construction of this indicator system is explained and an abridged version is introduced that can be comprised into one master table. Next, an overall evaluation of welfare development in West Germany is given and four models for a time-sequence interpretation are discussed. Finally, the present effort is put in perspective, e.g. in regard of the OECD program and of recent quality-of-life survey research.     

Social bonding and loneliness after network disruption: A longitudinal study of East German refugees

After the 1989 breakdown of the communist system, 235 East Germans were interviewed three times during the two years following their transition to West Berlin. In moving to the west, the migrants had to deal with various stressors, among them the lack of social ties in their new environment. Fortunately, the number of their new friends increased steadily, and loneliness declined. These changes, however, differed between sexes and age groups. Men made more friends than women, in particular same-sex friends, whereas women knitted ties with both sexes. The young built larger networks than the intermediate age group. Loneliness emerged as an inhibiting factor in the bonding process. The study demonstrates how well these refugees coped with a social crisis. It also examines the roles that loneliness and social bonding played in the readjustment process.     

Income Comparisons Among Neighbours and Satisfaction in East and West Germany

A series of studies have suggested that changes in others’ income may be perceived differently in post-transition and capitalist societies. This paper draws on the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics in very tightly drawn neighbourhoods to investigate whether reactions to changes in their neighbours’ income divide the German nation. We find that the neighbourhood income effect for West Germany is negative (which is in line with the ‘relative income’ hypothesis) and slightly more marked in neighbourhoods that may be assumed to be places where social interactions between neighbours take place. In contrast, the coefficients on neighbourhood income in East Germany are positive (which is consistent with the ‘signalling’ hypothesis), but statistically not significant. This suggests not only that there is a divide between East and West Germany, but also that neighbours may not be a relevant comparison group in societies that have comparatively low levels of neighbouring.     

Using Mokken methods to develop robust cross-national scales: American and West German attitudes toward abortion

A fundamental methodological issue in cross-national research on attitudes is the comparability of the attitude measures across populations. We address this issue by presenting the Mokken method and accompanying Mokken test as a means for developing equivalent attitude scales. We apply these methods to an analysis of the responses to seven abortion items in the 1982 NORC GSS and West German ALLBUS combined files. We find that the seven items form a unidimensional scale in both countries and that four of these items constitute a scale that is robust across the two populations. We conclude by describing how such results can be used to guide the development of Rasch and LISREL models.     

Welfare Regimes and Welfare Opinions: a Comparison of Eight Western Countries

Social Indicators Research -     

从人口受教育程度看我国东西部地区人口文化素质差异

本文以人口普查的资料为依据,对中国东西部人口各种受教育程度指标进行了大致的分析,进而比较了这两个地区人口文化素质的具体差异,同时提出了缩短两地人口文化素质差距,提高西部地区人口文化素质的相应对策及建议。     

从瑞典福利制度看北欧福利国家模式

北欧国家形成的“斯堪的纳维亚福利模式”一直受到世界的瞩目,该模式以社会再分配作为基石,通过大面积的普遍性公共资助计划给予国民基本的社会福利,同时辅之以社会保险和社会救助。在分析北欧国家的福利制度时,最重要的一点是区分普遍性的公共资助计划、真正意义上的社会保险和社会救助三者之间的界限以及模糊地带。本文旨在通过对瑞典福利制度的介绍,透视整个北欧国家的福利模式。     

山东省东西部人口老龄化差异评析

山东省是人口大省,人口老龄化进程很快,2000年底,65岁及以上人口所占比重已达到8.12%。并且其人口老龄化还存在很大的地区差异,本文拟从人口老龄化程度、人口老龄化速度以及老龄人口学特征方面加以对比评析,继而探究这种地区差异形成的原因。     

The Importance of Freedom in the East and the West Over Time: A Meta-analytic Study of Predictors of Well-Being

We examined whether sense of freedom is an important predictor of well-being, as compared to other typical predictors, across different periods in modern times (1981–2011), and in the East and the West. We applied a meta-analytical approach to the results of a series of multiple regression analyses conducted on six individual waves of Japanese data sets and five individual waves of American data sets from the World Values Survey. The final sample comprised 6389 Japanese and 6176 American respondents during all study periods. The main findings were that sense of freedom was one of the strongest predictors of life satisfaction (a) among several predictors (i.e., health condition, household income, marital status), (b) consistently across waves, and (c) in both Japan and the United States, as typical collectivistic Eastern and individualistic Western countries. We conclude that the greater importance of sense of freedom in ensuring well-being than other typical predictors is applicable to individuals across time and cultures.     

The Relationship between Economic Development and Social Welfare: A New Adjusted GDP Measure of Welfare

Existing literature focuses on the issue ofpreparation of social welfare measurements onthe basis of an unadjusted Gross DomesticProduct (GDP). This paper extends this methodto incorporate cost-benefit analysis ofeconomic growth in a growing economy incalculating the adjusted GDP, termed as thecost-benefit (CB)-adjusted GDP. This approachis empirically applied to Thailand. There arestark differences between GDP per capita and CBadjusted GDP per capita rates for this period.This paper concludes that GDP can be used as anindicator of social welfare if the GDPestimates are undertaken within a cost-benefitanalysis framework.     

Welfare production: Public versus private

Welfare is one of the highest values in modern societies and refers primarily to the living conditions and the perceived life quality of individuals and families. This paper is asking how welfare is generated in society, what are the producers, the products, the production processes, the limits of particular productions, and new innovative “mixes”. After a survey of the literature (theory of social production, well-being accounting, political productivity, social policy intervention), a scheme of four major institutions of welfare production is discussed: markets, bureaucracies, associations, private households. Next, the present dilemmas and the innovative potential of each particular institution and of pair-and triple combinations are briefly explored, e.g. new “corporatist” patterns. Two case studies (“shadow economy”, household production) are investigating the policy question of how private initiatives, the resources of associations and private households, and new combinations of public and private efforts may overcome some of the deadlocks in the present “market failure” and “state failure”.     

The new German citizenship law and its impact on German demographics: research notes

The processes of marginalization and inclusion of immigrants vary widely among industrialized welfare states. Models of citizenship, as a mechanism of both inclusion and exclusion, shape, to a large degree, the outcome of these processes. They affect the way immigrant and ethnic groups identify themselves within the mainstream society. This research note discusses whether or not institutional approaches to naturalization developed in the United States apply to the German case in the wake of the German citizenship reform of 1999. It also demonstrates how the introduction of birthright citizenship has caused a dramatic change in such demographic trends as the number of births to immigrants at both the federal and local levels. Berlin will provide the context at the local level for the impact of the citizenship reform on local official statistics.     

福利的行政化与政治化

文章回顾了福利国家行政机构的建立,讨论了福利国家内部的政治运作和政治程序,分析了“社会价值”的性质和力量。文章指出,福利国家是行政主义的国家,它的行政机制改变了国家内部的社会和生产关系。福利国家将很多矛盾内部化,进而通过政策制定和政策程序来解决政治问题,福利政治是政策化的政治。在福利国家建设过程中形成的“社会权利”观念也是一种政治力量,它的压力可以削减福利国家内部的商业力量,推动国家干预的发展。但是,经济全球化带来的经济压力正在挑战“社会权利”的传统意义。文章认为,考察福利国家的运作和走向,福利政治是一个不可或缺的角度。     

Welfare states and inequality: Institutional designs and distributive outcome

Comparative studies on inequality have suffered from severe methodological problems, which mean that issues related to the causes of cross-national variation in inequality remain unresolved. In comparative welfare state research, the preoccupation with expenditure data has also meant that the welfare state itself has remained a black box. By examining new comparative data on social policy institutions and income inequality among different population groups, this study provides a more precise empirical basis for evaluating different, and divergent, theories on the welfare state and equality. Three cases will be used as illustrations: family policy and child poverty, unemployment benefits and poverty among working aged, and old-age pensions and poverty among the elderly. The results suggest that the key for understanding the effect of the welfare state lies in the institutional design—in the level and distribution of social rights. The importance of the welfare state for social stratification deserves to be given more attention by sociological research in the future.     

An Assessment of Social Welfare in Spain: Territorial Analysis Using a Synthetic Welfare Indicator

The aim of this paper is measure social welfare in Spanish provinces. To achieve this, we use the distance method P₂ to compose a synthetic indicator of welfare for 2007, the last year for which data are available. The index comprises information on different social indicators from various life domains and enables a classification of Spanish provinces, as well as a study of the impact of each individual indicator in order to determine provincial disparities in social welfare levels.     

Welfare Exit,Marriage, and Welfare Recidivism: A Reevaluation of Patterns of the 1980s and 1990s

We examine the relationship between marriage and welfare recidivism for women leaving a first welfare spell, using the 1979–2000 panels of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Previous studies have found that women who marry around the time of welfare exit have lower rates of welfare return than women who stay single. However, more marriages occur before or after welfare exit than occur at the time of welfare exit. We find that marriages that precede or follow welfare exit by more than 12 months are not associated with significantly lower rates of welfare return. We also confirm previous findings that marriages formed within a year of welfare exit are associated with reduced rates of welfare return. However, these reduced rates mostly indicate later welfare returns rather than fewer welfare returns. Overall, our findings indicate a much weaker association between marriage and welfare independence than has been previously reported for this time period.