Willem De Koster
Biographic Data
| ID | 121964 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Willem De Koster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Willem |
| FAMILY NAME | De Koster |
| SIGNATURE | DE KOSTER W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9250-2072 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 779 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Why Is Adherence to Dietary Guidelines Socially Stratified among Adults? The Role of Declarative and Nondeclarative Cultural Capital
Cultural capital is theorized to comprise both a declarative (i.e., deliberate/conscious) and a nondeclarative (i.e., automatic/unconscious) element, also referred to as “embodied.” While the latter is considered crucial in everyday health-related choices and in explaining why members of the higher strata more often make healthier ones, extant quantitative research has been unable to empirically measure it. This study implemented a novel method t…
A straightforward trajectory strengthens support for the transition away from natural gas
In many countries, energy policies have helped start the move away from natural gas to achieve climate neutrality. Public support for this transition, however, is not unequivocal. This might be because renewable energy policies are not well aligned with individuals' perspectives, namely how renewable energy initiatives: 1) relate to personal needs; 2) align with local communities; and 3) raise or abate doubts. Increasing sensitivity to these pers…
How does exposure to information on ethnic discrimination inspire belief change? A preregistered population‐based survey experiment testing resonance and dissonance mechanisms
Informed by the information‐deficit model, this preregistered survey experiment based on a random sampling of the Dutch population register ( n = 2792) assesses how exposure to information about ethnic discrimination inspires adult belief change, especially how it affects (a) perceptions of ethnic inequality, (b) meritocratic explanations of ethnic inequality, and (c) attitudes toward affirmative action. Moreover, we assess two mechanisms through…
Naughty Schoolgirl on Her Knees”
What is the effect of providing information about the science behind vaccination? A population-based survey experiment on support for the MMR vaccine
This study examines the effects of including information about the scientific research behind vaccination in information provision about the MMR vaccine on societal acceptance and perceived legitimacy of the vaccine. We also test whether these effects are shaped by nature-oriented or science-oriented worldviews. Employing a pre-registered survey experiment conducted among members of a high-quality Dutch panel established using official population…
De volgende stap in stratificatiesociologie
Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community
Examining trust in the police and justice system among ethnic minority members
While extant studies indicate that ethnic minority citizens report relatively low levels of trust in the police and justice system, it is less clear how that trust can be explained. Thanks to its purposive oversampling of Dutch citizens with Turkish and Moroccan origins and nested structure (individuals clustered within neighbourhoods), the Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study has enabled us to scrutinise which of the following factors contr…
The educational divide in climate change attitudes
Research has frequently found that less-educated citizens are more skeptical about climate change and show less trust in climate science than their more-educated counterparts. We advance insights on why this educational divide exists by: 1) scrutinizing the relevance of the dominant knowledge-deficit explanation by uniquely using an objective measure of scientific knowledge; and 2) theorizing and empirically testing a novel explanation on the imp…
Filling the EU information deficit mitigates negative EU attitudes among the least knowledgeable. Evidence from a population-based survey experiment
The cognitive mobilisation thesis suggests that increasing knowledge on the European Union (EU) would lead to increased support for the institution. We test this with a strategic case whereby we provide information on the EU's subsidiarity principle to the citizenry of a small member state and examine whether it mitigates negative EU attitudes. In an original, pre-registered, population-based survey experiment conducted with members of a panel re…
Between Suspicion and Benevolence
Citizens with lower social status are underrepresented in participatory democratic innovations like citizens’ initiatives. Much research focuses on the barriers to participation that these citizens experience. The current study concentrates on civil servants tasked with advising on what initiatives to support and how. Informed by research on the social construction of target groups and the use of social stereotypes by civil servants, our work scr…
Explaining the educational gradient in trust in politicians
Many liberal democracies are characterised by strong educational gradients in political trust: less-educated citizens have strikingly less trust in politicians than more-educated citizens. Informed by a wide body of research, this study tests systematically the empirical relevance of three characteristics of politicians that have been theorised as explanations for the educational gradient in trust in politicians: (1) substantive cultural stances …
What do stances on immigrants' welfare entitlement mean? Evidence from a correlational class analysis
Recent in-depth qualitative research indicates that different people ascribe different meanings to their apparently similar stances on immigrants' entitlement to welfare. We are the first to investigate such variation quantitatively among the public-at-large, applying the novel method Correlational Class Analysis to an original survey fielded among a representative sample in the Netherlands (n = 2138). We uncover five ways of looking at immigrant…
Politicians' high-status signals make less-educated citizens more supportive of aggression against government
Various branches of the literature suggest that exposure to the high-status appearances and lifestyles of politicians in contemporary "diploma democracies" affects the attitudes and behavior of less-educated citizens because it confronts them with their lower status in the political domain. Informed by this, we theorize that such exposure inspires docility (a lower subjective social status, weaker feelings of political entitlement) and revolt (an…
Advancing Stratification Research by Measuring Non-declarative Cultural Capital
Cultural capital is a central concept in stratification research. Crucial to the Bourdieusian habitus, upper strata familiarity with the dominant culture is assumed to be ingrained via socialization, allowing its members to smoothly navigate educational institutions and higher segments of the labor market. Although cultural capital is deemed partially implicit, such "non-declarative" or "embodied" cultural capital has largely escaped empirical sc…
Wikipedia
Many authors have argued that digital technologies enable collaboration without central oversight or authority, obviating the need for the hierarchical bureaucracies that characterize industrial capitalism. In this context, Wikipedia is often mentioned as a paradigmatic example. We draw on the classical accounts of Robert Michels and Max Weber to study mechanisms pushing towards or away from power concentration and bureaucratization. Our historic…
Does the prospect of further sovereignty loss fuel Euroscepticism? A population-based survey experiment
Whether further European integration is desirable is an ongoing question in public opinion research: both extant research and the outcome of various EU-related referendums show that many citizens hold negative views on proposals that lead to further loss of national sovereignty.An important issue thus arises: does the prospect of such additional sovereignty loss increase negativity towards the EU?This study attempts to answer this question using …
Does informing citizens about the non-meritocratic nature of inequality bolster support for a universal basic income? Evidence from a population-based survey experiment
Despite citizens' precarization and policymakers' enthusiasm for a universal basic income (UBI), this alternative to targeted welfare has, curiously, received limited popular support. We theorize that this is due to people overestimating society's meritocratic nature. Accordingly, we field a randomized survey experiment with a representative sample of the Dutch population (n = 1,630) to investigate the impact of information provision about the no…
Understanding less-educated citizens' (non-)participation in citizens' initiatives
This article provides better understanding of less-educated citizens' underrepresentation in citizens' initiatives. Based on in-depth interviews with less-educated citizens in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the study discerned that the concepts of 'feelings of entitlement' and a 'taste for politics' are crucial for understanding their (non-)participation. The study uncovered that sub-dimensions of these concepts occur in different combinations, yiel…
Why are anti‐smoking health‐information interventions less effective among low‐socioeconomic status groups? A systematic scoping review
Receptive to an authoritative voice? Experimental evidence on how patronizing language and stressing institutional sources affect public receptivity to nutrition information
Common strategies to make official nutrition information more persuasive include highlighting its institutional sources and using simple and direct language. However, such strategies may be counterproductive, as institutions are no longer self-evidently deemed to be legitimate in contemporary societies and such language can be viewed as patronizing. Our preregistered, population-based survey experiment fielded among a high-quality Dutch probabili…
Belief in Meritocracy Reexamined
Despite decreasing intergenerational mobility, strengthening the ties between family background and children’s economic outcomes, Western citizens continue to believe in meritocracy. We study how meritocratic beliefs about success relate to individuals’ social mobility experiences: Is subjective upward mobility associated with meritocratic attributions of success and downward mobility with structuralist views? Whereas previous studies addressed t…
Different understandings of welfare benefits among the Dutch public
Numerous studies have assessed the extent to which citizens support or oppose welfare benefits (shorthand: benefits). To properly understand this support or opposition, it is important to consider what benefits actually mean to citizens. Indeed, because citizens' understandings of benefits are likely to vary, there may be similar (different) levels of support for very different (similar) reasons. Consequently, in‐depth insights into these underst…
What Does the EU Actually Mean to Citizens? An in‐Depth Study of Dutch citizens' Understandings and Evaluations of the European Union
Although citizens' attitudes towards the European Union (EU) have been examined extensively, there is a dearth of studies on what the EU actually means to them. Inspired by observations suggesting that the EU means different things to different people, this research aimed to uncover these views using an inductive approach: 13 group interviews with a heterogenous set of homogenous groups. 45 Dutch citizens, strategically selected from various soci…
Support for European Union membership comes in various guises
While ample research has scrutinised the causes and consequences of support for the European Union, a pressing question remains: what do people actually mean when they express support for, or opposition to, their country’s membership of the institution? We use Correlational Class Analysis to assess this. Our analysis of high-quality representative Dutch survey data ( n = 2053), including novel items informed by in-depth qualitative research, reve…
Becoming skeptical towards vaccines
The new right and the welfare state
Next to their well-documented authoritarian cultural agenda, new-rightist populist parties have developed specific views on the welfare state: welfare chauvinism and welfare populism. This article studies the electoral relevance of these views for Dutch new-rightist populist parties by means of survey data representative of the Dutch population ( N = 1972). The electorate of those parties shows high levels of both welfare chauvinism and welfare p…
Some are more equal than others’
Various studies have demonstrated that while the lower educated support economic redistribution more than the higher educated do, they nonetheless dislike welfare support for immigrants more strongly. This paper aims to explain this remarkably particularistic application of the principle of economic egalitarianism (‘welfare chauvinism’) by testing three theories by means of survey data representative of the Dutch population ( N = 1972). The first…
Three Worlds of Welfare Chauvinism? How Welfare Regimes Affect Support for Distributing Welfare to Immigrants in Europe
Analyzing the 2008 wave of the European Social Survey, this study assesses whether an elaborate institutional theory is able to explain why levels of welfare chauvinism differ among welfare regimes. As expected, native populations in liberal and conservative welfare regimes prove more reluctant to distributing welfare services to immigrants than those in social-democratic ones. Adding country-level data, it is demonstrated that neither difference…
How people organise cultural attitudes
Political scientists generally agree that all individuals structure their cultural attitudes in the same unidimensional fashion. However, various populist radical right parties remarkably combine moral progressiveness with conservatism regarding immigration-related issues. This suggests that the structuring of cultural attitudes among the electorate may also be more complex than typically assumed. Applying Correlational Class Analysis to represen…
Progressiveness and the New Right
Whereas electoral support for new-rightist parties is often understood as driven by ethnocentric anti-immigrant sentiments, scholars have noted that new-rightist politicians have, surprisingly, stressed culturally progressive arguments in the last decade. Using recent Dutch survey data (N = 1,302) especially collected for this purpose, the article analyses the electoral relevance of three types of cultural progressiveness for voting for the new r…
Cultural Value Orientations and Christian Religiosity
Drawing upon problems of interpretation in political sociological research, this article questions the common practice of lumping together moral traditionalism and authoritarianism. First, it is demonstrated that of the two only moral traditionalism relates to religious orthodoxy. Second, the well-established strong correlation between both value orientations proves to be caused, in the case at hand solely by the circumstance that nontraditionali…
They don't know what it's like to be at the bottom
Why is discontent with politicians highest among less-educated citizens? Supplementing explanations concerning a lack of resources and knowledge, we examine the cultural distance to many a politician perceived by this group. Inspired by qualitative studies mapping the worldviews of people from the lower social strata, we explore less-educated citizens' perceptions of politicians using in-depth (group) interviews carried out in various regions of …
A Christian Cancellation of the Secularist Truce? Waning Christian Religiosity and Waxing Religious Deprivatization in the West
Analysis of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data collected in 18 Western countries in 1998 demonstrates that Christian desires for a public role of religion are strongest in countries where Christian religiosity is numerically most marginal. Moreover, Dutch data covering the period 1970-1996 confirm that the decline of the number of Christians in the Netherlands has been coincided by a strengthening of the call for public religion amon…
Dutch Covid-19 lockdown measures increased trust in government and trust in science
The Educational Gradient in Trust in Politicians in the Netherlands
Much of the educational gradient in trust in politicians remains unexplained by prevailing theories on material resources and institutional knowledge. Our novel explanation theorizes that: in its relationship with trust in politicians, education is a status indicator; and the lower trust in politicians among the less educated reflects the latter's opposition to the former's status signaling. Analyses of representative Dutch survey data (n = 1,296…
Social mobility and political distrust
Ethnic Segregation and Radical Right-Wing Voting in Dutch Cities
Previous studies have linked anti-immigrant voting and other indications of ethnic animosities to ethnic segregation, yielding different results. In this study, we focus on the locally strongly diverging support for Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom ( Partij voor de Vrijheid [PVV]) in the Dutch national parliamentary elections of 2006 and 2010 to assess how it can be understood that the effect of ethnic segregation on anti-immigrant voting varies…
Populism and Support for Protectionism
Leftist and rightist populist parties in Western Europe both oppose trade openness. Is support for economic protectionism also relevant for their electorates? We assess this in the Netherlands, where both types of populist parties have seats in parliament. Analyses of representative survey data ( n = 1,296) demonstrate that support for protectionism drives voting for such parties, as do the well-established determinants of political distrust (bot…
The Rise of the Penal State
Journal Article The Rise of the Penal State: Neo-Liberalization or New Political Culture? Get access Willem de Koster, Willem de Koster * *Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands; [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jeroen van der Waal, Jeroen van der Waal Search for other works by this author on: Ox…
Belief in Meritocracy Reexamined
Despite decreasing intergenerational mobility, strengthening the ties between family background and children’s economic outcomes, Western citizens continue to believe in meritocracy. We study how meritocratic beliefs about success relate to individuals’ social mobility experiences: Is subjective upward mobility associated with meritocratic attributions of success and downward mobility with structuralist views? Whereas previous studies addressed t…
Why do the less educated oppose trade openness? A test of three explanations in the Netherlands
The well-documented opposition to trade openness among the less educated is frequently interpreted in terms of the factor endowment model, suggesting that it is the insecure economic position of the less educated that underlies their disapproval. This theory is, however, contested. Consequently, we have developed two alternative explanations, dereification theory and political-knowledge theory, which are informed by the literature on economic glo…
The micro–macro interactive approach to political trust
The relevance of the macro‐context for understanding political trust has been widely studied in recent decades, with increasing attention paid to micro–macro level interactive relationships. Most of these studies rely on theorising about evaluation based on the quality of representation, stressing that more‐educated citizens are most trusting of politics in countries with the least corrupt public domains. In our internationally comparative study,…
A revolt of the deplored? The role of perceived cultural distance in the educational gradient in anti-establishment politics
Anti-establishment politics have become part of contemporary Western democracies. Less-educated citizens in particular have been found to display political distrust and populist attitudes, support populist parties, and abstain from voting. We advance a novel explanation for these patterns, drawing on extant theoretical insights to hypothesize that less- and more-educated citizens differ in the extent to which they perceive politicians to be cultu…
What Does the EU Actually Mean to Citizens? An in‐Depth Study of Dutch citizens' Understandings and Evaluations of the European Union
Although citizens' attitudes towards the European Union (EU) have been examined extensively, there is a dearth of studies on what the EU actually means to them. Inspired by observations suggesting that the EU means different things to different people, this research aimed to uncover these views using an inductive approach: 13 group interviews with a heterogenous set of homogenous groups. 45 Dutch citizens, strategically selected from various soci…
Support for European Union membership comes in various guises
While ample research has scrutinised the causes and consequences of support for the European Union, a pressing question remains: what do people actually mean when they express support for, or opposition to, their country’s membership of the institution? We use Correlational Class Analysis to assess this. Our analysis of high-quality representative Dutch survey data ( n = 2053), including novel items informed by in-depth qualitative research, reve…
Contesting Community Online
Whereas substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the online presentation of self, symbolic interactionist approaches are largely absent in the literature on virtual communities. Instead, recurrent questions are whether communities can exist online and whether specific online venues qualify as communities. This article aims to move beyond these dichotomous questions by studying how different meanings attached to an online venue can be unde…
Understanding less-educated citizens' (non-)participation in citizens' initiatives
This article provides better understanding of less-educated citizens' underrepresentation in citizens' initiatives. Based on in-depth interviews with less-educated citizens in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the study discerned that the concepts of 'feelings of entitlement' and a 'taste for politics' are crucial for understanding their (non-)participation. The study uncovered that sub-dimensions of these concepts occur in different combinations, yiel…
Improving Empirical Scrutiny of the Habitus
Many studies invoke the concept of the Bourdieusian habitus to account for a plethora of stratified patterns uncovered by conventional social-scientific methods. However, as a stratum-specific, embodied and largely non-declarative set of dispositions, the role of the habitus in those stratified patterns is typically not adequately scrutinised empirically. Instead, the habitus is often attributed theoretically to an empirically established link be…
Partner Politics
ObjectiveThe authors study how partners are relevant to voting.BackgroundPrevious studies have assessed whether having a partner influences political participation. The authors focus on how having a partner may affect political participation in different ways. The authors theorize and analytically disentangle three mechanisms through which partners relate to voting.MethodThe authors analyze the most recent wave of the European Social Survey and l…
The Effect of Religiosity on Life Satisfaction in a Secularized Context
The positive relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction is well-established. This relationship is, however, likely to vary across cultural contexts and different religious affiliations. Furthermore, research is needed to uncover why religion is relevant for life satisfaction. Addressing these issues, we investigate what dimensions of being religious play a role in the life satisfaction of individuals with different religious affiliati…
Cultural Value Orientations and Christian Religiosity
Drawing upon problems of interpretation in political sociological research, this article questions the common practice of lumping together moral traditionalism and authoritarianism. First, it is demonstrated that of the two only moral traditionalism relates to religious orthodoxy. Second, the well-established strong correlation between both value orientations proves to be caused, in the case at hand solely by the circumstance that nontraditionali…
‘Stormfront Is Like a Second Home to Me’
Although the subject of extreme right virtual community formation is often discussed, an online ‘sense of community’ among right-wing extremists has not been systematically analysed. It is argued that to study this phenomenon and to understand its backgrounds and function, the offline and online experiences and actions of those involved need to be taken into account. For this purpose, qualitative data has been collected on the web forum ‘Stormfro…
The Rise of the Penal State
Journal Article The Rise of the Penal State: Neo-Liberalization or New Political Culture? Get access Willem de Koster, Willem de Koster * *Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands; [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jeroen van der Waal, Jeroen van der Waal Search for other works by this author on: Ox…
A Christian Cancellation of the Secularist Truce? Waning Christian Religiosity and Waxing Religious Deprivatization in the West
Analysis of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data collected in 18 Western countries in 1998 demonstrates that Christian desires for a public role of religion are strongest in countries where Christian religiosity is numerically most marginal. Moreover, Dutch data covering the period 1970-1996 confirm that the decline of the number of Christians in the Netherlands has been coincided by a strengthening of the call for public religion amon…
Some are more equal than others’
Various studies have demonstrated that while the lower educated support economic redistribution more than the higher educated do, they nonetheless dislike welfare support for immigrants more strongly. This paper aims to explain this remarkably particularistic application of the principle of economic egalitarianism (‘welfare chauvinism’) by testing three theories by means of survey data representative of the Dutch population ( N = 1972). The first…
Contesting Community Online
Whereas substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the online presentation of self, symbolic interactionist approaches are largely absent in the literature on virtual communities. Instead, recurrent questions are whether communities can exist online and whether specific online venues qualify as communities. This article aims to move beyond these dichotomous questions by studying how different meanings attached to an online venue can be unde…
Paradoxes of Individualization
Contents: Introduction: the myth of individualization and the dream of individualism Agony of choice?: the social embeddedness of consumer decisions (with Sebastiaan van Doorn and Jochem Verheul) Beyond the spiritual supermarket: why new age spirituality is less privatized than they say it is 'Be who you want to be': commodified agency in online computer games 'Stormfront is like a second home to me': social exclusion of right-wing extremists Con…
Beyond the domestication of nature? Restructuring the relationship between nature and technology in car commercials
It is often assessed that the construction of nature, technology and the relation between both is in the midst of a restructuring without specifying exactly what different articulations can be distinguished and how they differ from the modern notion of nature being separated from and domesticated by technology. Through an analysis of car commercials, this study develops a typology of constellations of nature and technology. Besides the well-known…
Three Worlds of Welfare Chauvinism? How Welfare Regimes Affect Support for Distributing Welfare to Immigrants in Europe
Analyzing the 2008 wave of the European Social Survey, this study assesses whether an elaborate institutional theory is able to explain why levels of welfare chauvinism differ among welfare regimes. As expected, native populations in liberal and conservative welfare regimes prove more reluctant to distributing welfare services to immigrants than those in social-democratic ones. Adding country-level data, it is demonstrated that neither difference…
Ethnic Segregation and Radical Right-Wing Voting in Dutch Cities
Previous studies have linked anti-immigrant voting and other indications of ethnic animosities to ethnic segregation, yielding different results. In this study, we focus on the locally strongly diverging support for Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom ( Partij voor de Vrijheid [PVV]) in the Dutch national parliamentary elections of 2006 and 2010 to assess how it can be understood that the effect of ethnic segregation on anti-immigrant voting varies…
The new right and the welfare state
Next to their well-documented authoritarian cultural agenda, new-rightist populist parties have developed specific views on the welfare state: welfare chauvinism and welfare populism. This article studies the electoral relevance of these views for Dutch new-rightist populist parties by means of survey data representative of the Dutch population ( N = 1972). The electorate of those parties shows high levels of both welfare chauvinism and welfare p…
Progressiveness and the New Right
Whereas electoral support for new-rightist parties is often understood as driven by ethnocentric anti-immigrant sentiments, scholars have noted that new-rightist politicians have, surprisingly, stressed culturally progressive arguments in the last decade. Using recent Dutch survey data (N = 1,302) especially collected for this purpose, the article analyses the electoral relevance of three types of cultural progressiveness for voting for the new r…
Why do the less educated oppose trade openness? A test of three explanations in the Netherlands
The well-documented opposition to trade openness among the less educated is frequently interpreted in terms of the factor endowment model, suggesting that it is the insecure economic position of the less educated that underlies their disapproval. This theory is, however, contested. Consequently, we have developed two alternative explanations, dereification theory and political-knowledge theory, which are informed by the literature on economic glo…
Questioning Ethnic Identity
Although studies on ethnicity-of-interviewer effects demonstrate that the interviewer's ethnic background influences respondents' answers, they often do not take the multifaceted nature and context-dependency of ethnic identifications into account. We aim to contribute to the literature in two respects. First, we discern two aspects of ethnic identification-defining oneself as being ethnic and expressing feelings of belonging to ethnic groups-of …
Paradoxes of Individualization
Paradoxes of Individualization addresses one of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary sociology: whether a process of individualization is liberating selves from society so as to make them the authors of their personal biographies. The book adopts a cultural-sociological approach that firmly rejects such a notion of individualization as naïve. The process is instead conceptualized as an increasing social significance of moral notions of i…
Paradoxes of Individualization
A science confidence gap
Following up on suggestions that attitudes toward science are multi-dimensional, we analyze nationally representative survey data collected in the United States in 2014 ( N = 2006), and demonstrate the existence of a science confidence gap: some people place great trust in scientific methods and principles, but simultaneously distrust scientific institutions. This science confidence gap is strongly associated with level of education: it is larger…
How people organise cultural attitudes
Political scientists generally agree that all individuals structure their cultural attitudes in the same unidimensional fashion. However, various populist radical right parties remarkably combine moral progressiveness with conservatism regarding immigration-related issues. This suggests that the structuring of cultural attitudes among the electorate may also be more complex than typically assumed. Applying Correlational Class Analysis to represen…
The Effect of Religiosity on Life Satisfaction in a Secularized Context
The positive relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction is well-established. This relationship is, however, likely to vary across cultural contexts and different religious affiliations. Furthermore, research is needed to uncover why religion is relevant for life satisfaction. Addressing these issues, we investigate what dimensions of being religious play a role in the life satisfaction of individuals with different religious affiliati…
Why are Depressive Symptoms More Prevalent Among The Less Educated? The Relevance of Low Cultural Capital and Cultural Entitlement
Analyzing nationally representative survey data collected in the United States in 2014 (n = 1,932), we formulate and test a novel explanation for the educational gradient in depressive symptoms. We theorize that status as cultural capital drives this gradient in addition to well-established economic and social factors, via the feelings of cultural entitlement it inspires. Therefore, we use structural equation modeling to decompose the education e…
Social mobility and political distrust
Populism and Support for Protectionism
Leftist and rightist populist parties in Western Europe both oppose trade openness. Is support for economic protectionism also relevant for their electorates? We assess this in the Netherlands, where both types of populist parties have seats in parliament. Analyses of representative survey data ( n = 1,296) demonstrate that support for protectionism drives voting for such parties, as do the well-established determinants of political distrust (bot…
Order please! How cultural framing shapes the impact of neighborhood disorder on law-and-order voting
Euroscepticism among Dutch Leftist and Rightist Populist Constituencies
The U‐curve in euroscepticism is well established: both leftist and rightist populist constituencies are more eurosceptic than voters for establishment parties. Using rich survey data on a country with both constituencies represented in parliament (the Netherlands; n=1,296), we examine why euroscepticism drives populist voting. Our analyses demonstrate that euroscepticism is part of the well‐established link between both 1) distrust in politics a…
Improving Empirical Scrutiny of the Habitus
Many studies invoke the concept of the Bourdieusian habitus to account for a plethora of stratified patterns uncovered by conventional social-scientific methods. However, as a stratum-specific, embodied and largely non-declarative set of dispositions, the role of the habitus in those stratified patterns is typically not adequately scrutinised empirically. Instead, the habitus is often attributed theoretically to an empirically established link be…
Sociology (45 works) · Political science (43 works) · Psychology (36 works) · Social Psychology (31 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics (28 works) · Economics (27 works) · Law (22 works) · Social Psychology (22 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (20 works)