Alexi Gugushvili
Biographic Data
| ID | 198380 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexi Gugushvili |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexi |
| FAMILY NAME | Gugushvili |
| SIGNATURE | GUGUSHVILI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3933-9111 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 369 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Crowd-control chemicals and medical witness in Georgia
Framing artificial intelligence
Public communication about artificial intelligence (AI) alternates between narratives of benefit and narratives of risk, but evidence on whether these frames move public opinion remains limited. We conducted a preregistered, three-arm online survey experiment in Denmark using a quota-based sample from a national panel. Respondents were randomly assigned to a neutral definition of AI, a risk-focused message paired with a cautionary image, or a ben…
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and perceived intergenerational mobility in Czechia and Uruguay. An unexpected event during survey design study
Can large-scale geopolitical shocks causally reshape how individuals perceive their intergenerational mobility? War unsettles everyday life through security fears, policy uncertainty, inflation, and energy shocks—factors that can recalibrate the benchmarks people use when comparing their lives to their parents’. We address this question by examining the immediate impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on mobility perceptions using a quasi-experim…
Feeling better off? A multidimensional approach to perceived mobility across life domains
Analyzes perceived life progress across six domains in five European countries. • Reveals clustering patterns in subjective intergenerational mobility perceptions. • Links perceived progress to national context, social position, and wellbeing. • Introduces a multidimensional framework for studying subjective mobility. • Highlights the spatial and relational foundations of wellbeing across generation. Perceptions of being better or worse off than …
Adult children's unemployment and parental mental health in India
This study explores the relationship between adult children's unemployment and parental mental health. Given India's large inequalities in social capital and income, we examine the heterogeneous effects of these factors on the relationship. We utilise data from the Longitudinal Ageing Survey of India, which includes 73,396 individuals aged 45 and above. We analyse the relationship between the exposure to the unemployment of adult children and the…
What Are the Channels of Equality of Opportunity Perceptions in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom
Views on equality of opportunity influence perceptions of fairness and redistributive attitudes, and yet the sources associated with these views remain underexplored. This study investigates how individual experiences, socialization with friends and family, and media consumption are related to perceptions of equality of opportunity across three welfare state regimes in Europe: Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Using original cross-national…
Downward Class Mobility and Far-Right Party Support in Western Europe
This article contributes to debates about the importance of class in far-right voting behavior by focusing on intergenerational class mobility. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), we employ Diagonal Reference Models (DRMs) to examine whether and how actual downward class mobility is linked to far-right party voting. First, drawing on a framework that focuses on discontent, loss, and blame, we explore four types of mechanisms that ma…
Equality of opportunity and mortality around the world
BACKGROUND: Educational mobility is considered a key driver of population health. While prior studies suggest that intergenerational equality of opportunity may be linked to mortality, most evidence comes from high-income countries. Little is known about whether these associations apply globally. OBJECTIVE: This study assesses the relationship between intergenerational educational mobility and all-cause mortality across a global sample of countri…
Does partnership predict mortality? Evidence from a twin fixed effects study design
This study examines the association between partnership status and mortality, addressing methodological concerns such as selection effects and unobserved heterogeneity. Utilizing Norwegian administrative data on birth cohorts from 1955 to 1975, we analyze mortality outcomes using Kaplan-Meier survival analyses and Cox proportional hazards regression models. The dataset includes over 1.2 million individuals and distinguishes between partnered and …
Origin, destination, or mobility? A systematic review of studies using diagonal reference models
Intergenerational mobility and emigration willingness and intentions in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia
Transforming European Societies through open access and transparency
As we mark the end of our third year as editors of European Societies, we witness a significant transition: the journal has now changed publishers, moving from Taylor & Francis to MIT Press. This moment of change provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on the journal's development and achievements over the past three years, considering both the progress made and the direction we envision for the future
When the guns fall silent
How Europeans compare Putin and Stalin in the context of Russia's war in Ukraine
Russian public perceptions of the war in Ukraine
The effect of anti-discrimination legislation on individuals with disabilities in Nordic countries
Nordic countries are renowned for progressive welfare systems and a high quality of life, yet disparities persist between individuals with and without disabilities. This study investigates whether anti-discrimination legislation in these nations enhances socioeconomic outcomes for individuals with disabilities, focusing on subjective well-being, self-rated health, institutional trust, political engagement, labour market participation, and materia…
A Register-Based Study of Early-Life Disabilities and Income Attainment in Adulthood
Individuals with disabilities are likely to be doubly disadvantaged, as they tend to earn less but require more financial resources than individuals without disabilities to maintain an average standard of life. Exploring the links between early-life disabilities and income attainment in adulthood requires high-quality data that allow accounting for selection into disability as well as a comprehensive list of predictors of income attainment. The a…
The Heterogeneous Effects of College Education on Outcomes Related to Deaths of Despair
College education features prominently in research on determinants of deaths from substance use disorders and self-harm-outcomes collectively referred to as 'deaths of despair' (DoD). Limited attention has been given to whether the protective effects of college education on indicators of despair vary by individuals' likelihood of college completion. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health for 6,145 individua…
The effect of legislation on perceived disability discrimination
Equalizing opportunities and outcomes between individuals with and without disabilities is a stated goal for most governments in Western welfare democracies. Yet, significant disability-based inequalities remain in many domains of life. One of the causes of this gap is the widespread discrimination of individuals with disabilities. Over the last two decades, most European countries have introduced anti-discrimination legislation to reduce disabil…
Understanding Ukrainian society before and after the Russian invasion
International audience
Intergenerational Educational Mobility and Cognitive Trajectories Among Middle-Aged and Older Chinese People
In future research, the impact of mobility can be studied in longitudinal data sets by combining the GMM and MCM approaches. The net negative effect of intergenerational educational mobility on cognitive trajectory patterns indicates that it should be recognized as an independent predictor of cognitive decline
Russia's invasion of Ukraine and perceived intergenerational mobility in Europe
In this study, we shed light on the social consequences the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had in other European countries. We argue that positive perceptions of one's intergenerational mobility are linked with political and economic stability and that the war can thus be expected to impact intergenerational mobility perceptions. We test our pre‐registered hypothesis with representative survey data from three European countries, the Unit…
Early-life impairments, chronic health conditions, and income mobility
Individuals who have congenital conditions or become disabled early in life tend to have poorer educational and occupational outcomes than non-disabled individuals. Disability is known to be a complex entity with multiple causations, involving, inter alia, physiological, social, economic, and cultural factors. It is established that social factors can influence educational and occupational attainment for disabled people, and current disability po…
A longitudinal study of perceived social position and health-related quality of life
We provide new evidence on the significant and non-linear links between perceived social position and health-related quality of life and highlight possible pathways linking these two aspects of individuals' lives
The heterogeneous well-being effects of intergenerational mobility perceptions
Individuals make comparisons with their parents which determine their intergenerational mobility perceptions, yet very little is known about the areas used for intergenerational comparison and whether these matter for individuals' well-being. In 2021 we commissioned a nationally representative survey in Georgia in which we explicitly asked 1159 individuals an open-ended question on the most important areas in their intergenerational comparisons. …
Falling from grace' and 'rising from rags
The Direct Effect of Social Origins on Social Mobility Chances
In this article we pursue, using appropriate British birth cohort data, various issues that arise from recent research into the ‘direct’ effect of social origins on individuals’ social mobility chances: i.e. the effect that is not mediated by education and that can be seen as giving rise to non-meritocratic ‘glass floors’ and ‘glass ceilings’. We show that if educational level is determined at labour market entry, class destinations are significa…
Intergenerational objective and subjective mobility and attitudes towards income differences
This article explores the association between intergenerational social mobility and attitudes towards income differences in post-socialist societies. I hypothesise that based on the psychological mechanism of self-serving bias in causal attribution, those who experience upward social mobility are more likely to support greater income differences, and that subjective intergenerational mobility has stronger association with attitudes towards income…
Intergenerational Social Mobility and Popular Explanations of Poverty
This article explores the consequences of intergenerational social mobility on perceptions of popular explanations of poverty. It is hypothesised that those who experience improvements in socio-economic status through social mobility are more likely to blame poverty on individual characteristics such as laziness and lack of willpower and are less likely to attribute failure to injustice in society, and on the macro-level, the effect of social mob…
Stalin is dead, long live Stalin? Testing socialization, structural, ideological, nationalist, and gender hypotheses
Recently, there has been a renewed focus on analyzing post-Soviet memory, including the rekindling of debate on contemporary perspectives of Josef Stalin. Most notably, the publication of The Stalin Puzzle has helped bring attention to the persistence of positive accounts and admiration, along with ambivalent and contested images, of the former dictator of the Soviet Union. Using survey data and multivariate statistical methods, we test five broa…
Why do people perceive themselves as being downwardly or upwardly mobile
This study explores individual and contextual explanations of why some people perceive themselves as being mobile and others do not. While subjective social position in recent decades has become an important topic of sociological enquiry, only a handful of studies explicitly investigate the nature of subjective perception of intergenerational mobility. When assessing their performance in comparison to their parents, individuals are likely to cons…
A New Chance for Georgian Democracy
Something amazing happened in Georgia’s 1 October 2012 parliamentary elections. The government lost and it gave up power, aside from the now-weakened presidency that it will hold for another year. A new coalition known as Georgian Dream ran under the leadership of Georgia’s richest man, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, and won 85 seats in the unicameral, 150-member Parliament. Georgia’s post-Soviet background and circumstances make the 2012 o…
Does perceived social mobility affect health? Evidence from a fixed effects approach
A multilevel analysis of perceived intergenerational mobility and welfare state preferences
Previous scholarship suggests that the effect of perceived intergenerational mobility on attitudes related to social justice, inequality and redistribution is more salient than the effect of individuals' objective intergenerational mobility. However, virtually no studies have attempted to link individuals' perception of experiencing intergenerational mobility and their support for different welfare state programmes. In my study using nationally r…
Intergenerational Mobility in Relative Educational Attainment and Health-Related Behaviours
Subjective social mobility and health in Germany
One’s current socioeconomic position is intimately tied to one’s health status. Further, childhood living conditions also exert lasting effects on the health of adults. However, studies on changes in one’s socioeconomic position over the life course rarely find consistent and systematic effects of social mobility for individual health and wellbeing. Such studies almost exclusively draw on objective measures of social mobility and do not consider …
Change or continuity? Intergenerational social mobility and post-communist transition
Which socio-economic comparison groups do individuals choose and why
Socio-economic comparison among individuals is the process by which individuals assess their own socio-economic position in relation to others. In this study we identify which are the most salient groups in socio-economic comparisons among individuals, clarify the role of individual-level characteristics in the selection of specific comparison groups, and test if contextual factors explain variation in individuals’ choices regarding their socio-e…
Social origins of support for democracy
Recent evidence suggests that popular disaffection with liberal-democratic norms and institutions has been growing in different regions of the world, but studying the social origins of democratic versus authoritarian political preferences are especially relevant in countries with immature democratic practices. The main concern of this article is the association between intergenerational social mobility and support for democracy in post-socialist …
Economic Liberalization and Intergenerational Mobility in Occupational Status
One of the most important components of post-socialist transition has been economic liberalization. This article inquiries into how the latter is associated with intergenerational mobility in occupational status. Using European Values Studies (evs) data from the nationally representative samples for a large number of post-socialist societies, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (ebrd) index of economic liberalization, and multile…
How do perceived changes in inequality affect health
Individuals do not possess an entirely accurate assessment of the level of income differences in their society and so changes in quantitative measures of income inequality may not always align with changes in the perceptions of income inequality. This disconnect is partly driven by how people form their opinions about the level of inequality. In this study we explore whether there is an association between perceptions of inequality and health, an…
A counterexample to secularization theory? Assessing the Georgian religious revival
Secularization theory allows for transitory religious revivals under certain conditions, such as extreme societal crises or state weakness. The country of Georgia has witnessed the largest religious revival of Orthodox countries and one of the most striking religious resurgences worldwide. This paper gives both a statistical and historical description of this revival and asks whether it is a counterexample to secularization theory. We show that t…
Self-interest, Perceptions of Transition and Welfare Preferences in the New Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus
This article studies public welfare preferences in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Generalised ordered logistic regression models and predicted probabilities are employed to analyse comparable attitudinal survey data. The results vary considerably among the countries, but age is the most important covariate of welfare preferences, followed by individuals’ socio-economic characteristics. The findings also indicate that …
Stalin on Their Minds
Recently there has been a renewed focus on analyzing post-communist memory, including the revitalization of debate on contemporary public perceptions of Josef Stalin. How do Russians and Georgians judge Stalin in the post-Soviet present? What individual characteristics are the best indicators of how someone evaluates Stalin? Scholars have offered various insights into the apparent resurgence of appreciation for the late Soviet leader, including n…
Downward Class Mobility and Far-Right Party Support in Western Europe
This article contributes to debates about the importance of class in far-right voting behavior by focusing on intergenerational class mobility. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), we employ Diagonal Reference Models (DRMs) to examine whether and how actual downward class mobility is linked to far-right party voting. First, drawing on a framework that focuses on discontent, loss, and blame, we explore four types of mechanisms that ma…
Russia's invasion of Ukraine and perceived intergenerational mobility in Europe
In this study, we shed light on the social consequences the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had in other European countries. We argue that positive perceptions of one's intergenerational mobility are linked with political and economic stability and that the war can thus be expected to impact intergenerational mobility perceptions. We test our pre‐registered hypothesis with representative survey data from three European countries, the Unit…
The heterogeneous well-being effects of intergenerational mobility perceptions
Individuals make comparisons with their parents which determine their intergenerational mobility perceptions, yet very little is known about the areas used for intergenerational comparison and whether these matter for individuals' well-being. In 2021 we commissioned a nationally representative survey in Georgia in which we explicitly asked 1159 individuals an open-ended question on the most important areas in their intergenerational comparisons. …
No evidence that social-democratic welfare states equalize valued outcomes for individuals with disabilities
It is acknowledged that generous welfare states can provide better outcomes to their populations in terms of objective and subjective indicators of well-being, yet there is little comparative evidence of the role that the welfare state regime plays in lessening disability-based inequalities. Using a large comparative data set of most European societies, Tukey's honestly significant difference and generalized Hausman tests for six welfare state re…
The ‘good life’ of Polish migrants in Britain
The situation of Polish migrants in Britain has mostly been analysed from the labour market perspective. More recently, research has also addressed the topic of migrants' social connections, identity and integration. However, little is known about their everyday lifestyle practices, in particular the nonmarket behaviours, such as socialising or consumption. These behaviours are constitutive for migrants' ‘homemaking’ in Britain and may impact the…
Equality of opportunity is linked to lower mortality in Europe
BACKGROUND: This study investigates if intergenerational equality of opportunity is linked to mortality in 30 European countries. Equality of opportunity may lead to greater returns on health investments and, consequently, improved health outcomes. In turn, a perceived lack of fairness in the distribution of life chances and limited possibilities for upward intergenerational mobility can cause anxiety among individuals and gradually compromise th…
A New Chance for Georgian Democracy
Something amazing happened in Georgia’s 1 October 2012 parliamentary elections. The government lost and it gave up power, aside from the now-weakened presidency that it will hold for another year. A new coalition known as Georgian Dream ran under the leadership of Georgia’s richest man, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, and won 85 seats in the unicameral, 150-member Parliament. Georgia’s post-Soviet background and circumstances make the 2012 o…
Unconditional love? Exploring hometown effect in Stalin’s birthplace
This article explores the impact of spatial location – place – on people’s attitudes by examining whether support for Stalin is concentrated in his birthplace: Gori, Georgia. Using a variety of multivariate statistical methods, including propensity score-matching, we examine a recent survey indicating high levels of admiration for Stalin in his home country. We explore two main questions: First, is there a “hometown effect” – do people in Gori lo…
A Personality Cult’s Rise and Fall
Recently, in post-Soviet space, new Stalin statues have been created, and old ones have reappeared. These battles, both symbolic and material, over monuments fuel and exemplify contemporary “memory wars.” This article highlights the disparate meanings of three historical Stalin monuments that served as focal points for three major cases of mass demonstrations during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign: Tbilisi, Budapest, and Prague. Next, draw…
Self-interest, Perceptions of Transition and Welfare Preferences in the New Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus
This article studies public welfare preferences in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Generalised ordered logistic regression models and predicted probabilities are employed to analyse comparable attitudinal survey data. The results vary considerably among the countries, but age is the most important covariate of welfare preferences, followed by individuals’ socio-economic characteristics. The findings also indicate that …
Stalin is dead, long live Stalin? Testing socialization, structural, ideological, nationalist, and gender hypotheses
Recently, there has been a renewed focus on analyzing post-Soviet memory, including the rekindling of debate on contemporary perspectives of Josef Stalin. Most notably, the publication of The Stalin Puzzle has helped bring attention to the persistence of positive accounts and admiration, along with ambivalent and contested images, of the former dictator of the Soviet Union. Using survey data and multivariate statistical methods, we test five broa…
Economic Liberalization and Intergenerational Mobility in Occupational Status
One of the most important components of post-socialist transition has been economic liberalization. This article inquiries into how the latter is associated with intergenerational mobility in occupational status. Using European Values Studies (evs) data from the nationally representative samples for a large number of post-socialist societies, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (ebrd) index of economic liberalization, and multile…
Mortality in Transition
In addition to reinforcing existing evidence linking smoking, hazardous drinking and unemployment to mortality, the PrivMort dataset will investigate the variation in transition experiences for individual respondents and their families across settlements characterized by differing contextual factors, including industrial characteristics, simultaneously providing information about how excess mortality is distributed across settlements with various…
Money can’t buy me land”
Intergenerational objective and subjective mobility and attitudes towards income differences
This article explores the association between intergenerational social mobility and attitudes towards income differences in post-socialist societies. I hypothesise that based on the psychological mechanism of self-serving bias in causal attribution, those who experience upward social mobility are more likely to support greater income differences, and that subjective intergenerational mobility has stronger association with attitudes towards income…
Intergenerational Social Mobility and Popular Explanations of Poverty
This article explores the consequences of intergenerational social mobility on perceptions of popular explanations of poverty. It is hypothesised that those who experience improvements in socio-economic status through social mobility are more likely to blame poverty on individual characteristics such as laziness and lack of willpower and are less likely to attribute failure to injustice in society, and on the macro-level, the effect of social mob…
Change or continuity? Intergenerational social mobility and post-communist transition
Collective memory and reputational politics of national heroes and villains
The politics of memory plays an important role in the ways certain figures are evaluated and remembered, as they can be rehabilitated or vilified, or both, as these processes are contested. We explore these issues using a transition society, Georgia, as a case study. Who are the heroes and villains in Georgian collective memory? What factors influence who is seen as a hero or a villain and why? How do these selections correlate with Georgian nati…
The Direct Effect of Social Origins on Social Mobility Chances
In this article we pursue, using appropriate British birth cohort data, various issues that arise from recent research into the ‘direct’ effect of social origins on individuals’ social mobility chances: i.e. the effect that is not mediated by education and that can be seen as giving rise to non-meritocratic ‘glass floors’ and ‘glass ceilings’. We show that if educational level is determined at labour market entry, class destinations are significa…
Political democracy, economic liberalization, and macro-sociological models of intergenerational mobility
A multilevel analysis of perceived intergenerational mobility and welfare state preferences
Previous scholarship suggests that the effect of perceived intergenerational mobility on attitudes related to social justice, inequality and redistribution is more salient than the effect of individuals' objective intergenerational mobility. However, virtually no studies have attempted to link individuals' perception of experiencing intergenerational mobility and their support for different welfare state programmes. In my study using nationally r…
What about the Monument
The article uses mixed methods to explore the politics of memory surrounding the Stalin monument in Gori, Georgia, which was removed by the government in 2010. We employ bivariate and multivariate statistics to analyze people’s preferences in Georgia concerning the monument’s fate using socio-demographic, socio-economic, spatial, and political variables, identifying six factors as offering explanatory power: gender, age, place, socialization, edu…
How do perceived changes in inequality affect health
Individuals do not possess an entirely accurate assessment of the level of income differences in their society and so changes in quantitative measures of income inequality may not always align with changes in the perceptions of income inequality. This disconnect is partly driven by how people form their opinions about the level of inequality. In this study we explore whether there is an association between perceptions of inequality and health, an…
Stalin on Their Minds
Recently there has been a renewed focus on analyzing post-communist memory, including the revitalization of debate on contemporary public perceptions of Josef Stalin. How do Russians and Georgians judge Stalin in the post-Soviet present? What individual characteristics are the best indicators of how someone evaluates Stalin? Scholars have offered various insights into the apparent resurgence of appreciation for the late Soviet leader, including n…
Falling from grace' and 'rising from rags
Intergenerational Mobility in Relative Educational Attainment and Health-Related Behaviours
Parental education, health literacy and children’s adult body height
Human anthropometric traits, while significantly determined by genetic factors, are also affected by an individual’s early life environment. An adult’s body height is a valid indicator of their living conditions in childhood. Parental education has been shown to be one of the key covariates of individuals’ health and height, both in childhood and adulthood. Parental functional literacy has been demonstrated to be another important determinant of …
The ‘good life’ of Polish migrants in Britain
The situation of Polish migrants in Britain has mostly been analysed from the labour market perspective. More recently, research has also addressed the topic of migrants' social connections, identity and integration. However, little is known about their everyday lifestyle practices, in particular the nonmarket behaviours, such as socialising or consumption. These behaviours are constitutive for migrants' ‘homemaking’ in Britain and may impact the…
Which socio-economic comparison groups do individuals choose and why
Socio-economic comparison among individuals is the process by which individuals assess their own socio-economic position in relation to others. In this study we identify which are the most salient groups in socio-economic comparisons among individuals, clarify the role of individual-level characteristics in the selection of specific comparison groups, and test if contextual factors explain variation in individuals’ choices regarding their socio-e…
Social origins of support for democracy
Recent evidence suggests that popular disaffection with liberal-democratic norms and institutions has been growing in different regions of the world, but studying the social origins of democratic versus authoritarian political preferences are especially relevant in countries with immature democratic practices. The main concern of this article is the association between intergenerational social mobility and support for democracy in post-socialist …
Equality of opportunity is linked to lower mortality in Europe
BACKGROUND: This study investigates if intergenerational equality of opportunity is linked to mortality in 30 European countries. Equality of opportunity may lead to greater returns on health investments and, consequently, improved health outcomes. In turn, a perceived lack of fairness in the distribution of life chances and limited possibilities for upward intergenerational mobility can cause anxiety among individuals and gradually compromise th…
Sociology (38 works) · Economics (37 works) · Political science (35 works) · Psychology (30 works) · Health disparities and outcomes (25 works) · Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies (22 works) · Demographic economics (20 works) · Medicine (19 works) · Social mobility (19 works) · Politics (18 works)