Search results for "World Values Survey"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Religion and Civil Society: Theoretical Reflections
2013
Using World Values Survey data, this chapter begins with the global distinctiveness of European societies in terms of both religious vitality and support for the public role of religion. They exhibit a secularity that has been challenged in recent years by an unexpected return of religion as a contentious public issue. The chapter then asks, which theories in the social sciences can help to think constructively through the challenges of religion and civil society in such media-rich, religiously diverse, consumer-oriented secularised societies? It begins with sociology of religion, arguing that while secularisation and rational choice theories shed light on some developments, their conceptua…
Civic Participation and Gender Beliefs: An Analysis of 46 Countries
2016
Gender equality has progressed a great deal in recent decades in response to modernisation, industrialisation, and the generally rising level of education. A transformation in gender beliefs has accompanied the progress on gender equality and beliefs about gender roles have mainly changed in countries in North America and Europe, while in Muslim and Asian countries they have remained the same. The analysis in this article focuses on civic participation and investigates its relation to equalitarian gender beliefs. Multi-level regression models and data from World Values Survey (WVS) collected from 46 countries in 2005 allow depicting the relationships. The findings show that membership in ci…
Subjective Health and Subjective Well-Being (The Case of EU Countries)
2014
Article presents the concept of subjective health in the context of the structure of subjective well-being. We emphasize the structural link between satisfaction with health as a life domain and satisfaction with a life as a whole within cognitive part of subjective well-being. To explain the link between life satisfaction as a whole and satisfaction with health we apply Needs Conceptual Model of Subjective Well-Being and bottom-up approach. We recognize that objective life domains—life circumstances are mirrored and evaluated by human consciousness. The more or less favourable objective life circumstances are, the better or worse is the satisfaction with them by an individual. From the ver…
Entrepreneurial choices depend on trust : Some global evidence
2022
Interpersonal trust and people’s trust in institutions are important components of social capital, which has been shown to have not only innate social value but also diverse direct and indirect positive social and economic impacts. Using data for an economically and globally diverse group of countries, we examine empirically how changes in interpersonal trust and trust in institutions affect entrepreneurship over time. Our findings suggest that (1) enhancing either type of trust leads to more entrepreneurial activity and (2) an increase in interpersonal trust causes a structural change in the composition of the TEA-type entrepreneurship. Increased trust reduces the share of relatively lower…
Religion and Social Integration in France
2013
On some measures, France has the most integrated (and secularised) Muslim population in Europe. For example, attitude research shows that French Muslims share values closer to those of their non-Muslim neighbours than in other European countries (Connor 2010 391). While official sources of data are limited as the French government does not collect statistics organised by religion, ethnicity or any other form of collective identity, a number of private and international surveys have been carried out. Thus, the European Values Survey (2002–6 data) shows that rates of religious observance for Muslims in France are closer to those amongst the majority population than in either Britain or the Ne…
Modeling the Effects of Religious Belief and Affiliation on Prosociality
2021
To what extent do supernatural beliefs, group affiliation, and social interaction produce values and behaviors that benefit others, i.e., 'prosociality'? Addressing this question involves multiple variables interacting within complex social networks that shape and constrain the beliefs and behaviors of individuals. We examine the relationships among some of these factors utilizing data from the World Values Survey to inform the construction of an Agent-Based Model. The latter was able to identify the conditions under which – and the mechanisms by which – the prosociality of simulated agents was increased or decreased within an “artificial society” designed to reflect real world parameters. …
Blessed Mary, Forgive Us Our Deficits
2013
Many studies have explored the medium-term determinants of current account balances. This paper contributes to the existing literature by introducing religious variables that until now have been omitted. We propose that Catholic countries tend to run current account deficits. This result remains robust even if we include both the official financial flows and the variables measuring the quality of institutions. In total we control for close to all of the variables that have been included in previous studies. To rationalize our result we consulted the World Values Survey and discovered that Roman Catholics do not consider thrift as important as other religious groups.
How important is culture to understand political protest?
2021
Abstract The literature considers nonviolent protests among the most important predictors of transitions towards democracy and democratic reforms. This study addresses the conditionsmaking countries more likely to experience nonviolent instead of violent forms of protest. While the literature emphasizes economic and political predictors of protest at the country level, we expand the study of nonviolent-vs-violent protest by incorporating cultural predictors. To do so, we use a newly developed time-pooled cross-sectional database covering an established set of orientations from the World Values Survey, known as “emancipative values”. Estimating the prevalence of these values at the country l…
Conceptualizing and Measuring the Quality of Democracy: The Citizens' Perspective
2018
In recent years, several measurements of the quality of democracy have been developed (e.g. Democracy Barometer, Varieties of Democracy Project). These objective measurements focus on institutional and procedural characteristics of democracy. This article starts from the premise that in order to fully understand the quality of democracy such objective measurements have to be complemented by subjective measurements based on the perspective of citizens. The aim of the article is to conceptualize and measure the subjective quality of democracy. First, a conceptualization of the subjective quality of democracy is developed consisting of citizens’ support for three normative models of democracy …
Dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity among Christians and the religiously unaffiliated: A cross-cultural analysis based on the Inte…
2019
We present a study of the dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity for 26 countries with a Christian heritage, based on the 1998 and 2008 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Religion survey, using both exploratory and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses. The results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that three factors, common to Christian and religiously unaffiliated respondents, could be extracted from our initially selected items and suggested the testing of four different three-factor models using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. For the model with the best fit and measurement invariance properties, we labeled the three resulting…