Welfare Attitudes and Social Expenditure: Do Regimes Shape Public Opinion?

This article examines the link between regime types, social expenditure, and welfare attitudes. By employing data on 19 countries taken from the World Values Survey, the main aim is to see to what degree the institutions of a country affect the attitudes of its citizens. According to Esping-Andersen (The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990) welfare regimes can be classified into Liberal, Conservative, and Social Democratic categories. With this as my point of departure, I put forward two research questions: the first concerns the direct influence of regime type on people’s attitudes; the second seeks to trace the contours of the regime types by arguing that both social expenditure and welfare attitudes are products of a country’s institutional arrangements. These questions are answered through regression modelling and by examining the interplay between welfare attitudes, social expenditure, and welfare regimes. First, we see that there are significant differences in aggregated attitudes between countries belonging to the Liberal and the Conservative regimes, with the former’s citizens holding more rightist views than those of the latter. This is explained by the history and organization of welfare benefits of the two variations of Esping-Andersen’s classification. Second, by graphing welfare attitudes against social expenditure the outline of the three regime types mentioned above may be seen. Similar correspondence is not found with regards to an Eastern European category. All in all, this study renders some support for the regime argument.     

On the Use of Social Clocks for the Monitoring of Multidimensional Social Development

This article describes a new methodology for monitoring multidimensional social development using social clocks: comparisons with so called reference trajectories make it possible to establish the development stage of a country along a number of independent time axes, thus affording new opportunities for analyzing leads, lags, and asynchronies between variables and countries. This article explores these new possibilities and discusses some of the difficulties in the use of social clocks. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of the new concepts, the article presents an application of the methodology by analyzing the socio-economic development of ten Eastern European countries in the period before they joined the European Union.     

Risk, complexity, and deviations from expected-value maximization: Results of a lottery choice experiment

Varying several parameters of single-stage lottery choice tasks we investigate the question which features of a decision task lead subjects to deviate from maximizing expected monetary value (EV). Despite small differences in EV between the two lotteries in the choice sets, the subjects on average chose the lottery with the higher EV in every task. Risk avoidance occurs, but not consistently over all tasks. Further results are that subjects prefer less complex lotteries over more complex ones, and that risk matters the more the less complex the decision task is.     

Actors in Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion: Towards a Dynamic Approach

The terminological substitution of the poor/rich distinction by the exclusion/inclusion distinction marks an important innovation within social research, because it provides a multidimensional approach for the analysis of disadvantaged groups within society. The multidimensionality also implies that interactions between different dimensions of exclusion and inclusion become visible, hence offering a dynamic approach. Thus, research on exclusion/inclusion might be linked with longitudinal-data analyses. The dynamic aspect of the exclusion/inclusion research analytically upvalues the people involved in the processes of exclusion and inclusion. Social sciences no longer see them as nothing but victims, rather as actors coping with given circumstances. Thus, actors' own strategies become of crucial importance. As a consequence the notions of exclusion as 'bad' and inclusion as 'good' become unclear. Thus one has to take into account that actors perceive both inclusion and exclusion as 'good' or 'bad'.     

Discourse Failures and the NGO Sector: How Campaigning Can Undermine Advocacy

Within academic research, more and more scholars reveal the ambivalence of NGOs—the sometimes constructive, sometimes destructive role they play in solving societal problems. In this paper, we present a discourse analysis that illustrates how NGOs’ campaigning may undermine their reputation and advocacy function. We conclude that such discourse failures are frequently not merely an accidental by-product, but rather a not-intended consequence of deliberate NGOs’ campaigns. By applying ideas from political economy, we make particular note of probable discourse failures when campaigns attempt to deal with complex issues in an environment rife with wide-spread prejudices and where the NGO’s work is transparent. We present collectively institutionalized commitments for NGOs and commitment services enforced by political organizations as instruments that are suitable for increasing public accountability of the NGO sector. In conclusion, we argue that further research can benefit from systematically analyzing the interdependencies between discourses and institutions.     

The Inequality-Trust Nexus Revisited: At What Level of Aggregation Does Income Inequality Matter for Social Trust?

Social Indicators Research - The negative linkage between income inequality and social trust is widely acknowledged. Despite this consensus, it remains unclear at what level of aggregation income...     

Repeated chi-square testing

A sequentialized version of the x²; goodness of fit test, called repeated x,²; test, is introduced. The form of the asymptotic distribution of the repeated x² test statistic is given under the null hypothesis as well as under local alternatives. For various numbers of cells Monte Carlo results are given for critical values, power and distribution of stopping time. Finally, the perfor-mance of the repeated and the fixed sample x² test are compared.     

Asymptotically optimal rank tests for the two-sample problem with randomly censored data

Using the methods of asymptotic decision theory asymptotically optimal rank tests are constructed in the two-sample testing problem for translation families and positive scale families under the assumption of equal censoring in both samples. The resulting tests have a simple form extending the known tests for un-censored data in a natural way. Relations to a recent proposal by Albers and Akritas are discussed.