Beginning with the historic racial desegregation in the United States, and spreading to other parts of the world, policy makers, guided by the findings of social scientists (e.g., Allport, 1954), have advocated for increased intergroup contact (e.g., in schools and neighborhoods) as the key to prejudice reduction and increased social cohesion. Recent work on the ‘irony of harmony’ effect ( Saguy, Tausch, Dovidio, & Pratto, 2009), however, suggests that intergroup contact can undermine disadvantaged group’s support for social change toward greater equality (e.g., Çakal, Hewstone, Schwär, & Heath, 2011; Dixon, Durrheim, & Tredoux, 2007). Using a large and heterogeneous dataset (N = 12,997 individuals from 69 countries), we demonstrate that intergroup contact and support for social change toward greater equality are positively associated among members of advantaged groups (ethnic majorities and cis-heterosexuals), but negatively associated among disadvantaged groups (ethnic minorities and sexual and gender minorities), supporting the ‘irony of harmony’ effect. Specification curve analysis revealed important variation in the size—and at times, direction—of correlations, depending on how contact and support for social change were measured. This allowed us to identify one type of support for change, willingness to work in solidarity for social change, that is positively associated with intergroup contact among both advantaged- and disadvantaged-group members.

There is ample evidence that morphological and social cues in a human face provide signals of human personality and behaviour. Previous studies have discovered associations between the features of artificial composite facial images and attributions of personality traits by human experts. We present new findings demonstrating the statistically significant prediction of a wider set of personality features (all the Big Five personality traits) for both men and women using real-life static facial images. Volunteer participants (N = 12,447) provided their face photographs (31,367 images) and completed a self-report measure of the Big Five traits. We trained a cascade of artificial neural networks (ANNs) on a large labelled dataset to predict self-reported Big Five scores. The highest correlations between observed and predicted personality scores were found for conscientiousness (0.360 for men and 0.335 for women) and the mean effect size was 0.243, exceeding the results obtained in prior studies using ‘selfies’. The findings strongly support the possibility of predicting multidimensional personality profiles from static facial images using ANNs trained on large labelled datasets. Future research could investigate the relative contribution of morphological features of the face and other characteristics of facial images to predicting personality.

Soon after the collapse of Soviet-type communism in Central and Eastern Europe, a new geopolitical division began to reshape the continent. Our study demonstrates that this newly emerging geopolitical divide has been underpinned by a corresponding cultural divergence, of which “emancipative values” are the most powerful marker. Using the European Values Study/World Values Survey 1990 to 2014, we find that the former Iron Curtain no longer constitutes a cultural boundary because the ex-communist states that joined the European Union have been converging with the West’s strong emphasis on emancipative values. Instead, a new and steeply growing cultural gap has emerged between the European Union and its Eastern neighbors. The two competing geopolitical formations in the West and East—the European and Eurasian Unions, respectively—have diverged culturally in recent decades. The divergence goes back to contrasting supranational identities that originate in different religious traditions, which rulers have increasingly accentuated to strengthen their nations’ endorsement or dismissal of emancipative values. Through this sorting-out process, emancipative values became an increasingly significant marker of a Western-vs-Eastern cultural identity. Our study is the first to link this groundbreaking cultural transformation to civilizational identities and geopolitical rivalry.

This article links the consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. It innovates by combining the literature on economic voting with social movement research and by presenting the first integrated, large‐scale empirical analysis of protest mobilisation and electoral outcomes in Europe. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short‐run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the two arenas and the role of protests in politicising economic grievances. More specifically, it is argued that economic protests act as a ‘signalling mechanism’ by attributing blame to decision makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilisation should, thus, amplify the impact of economic hardship on the electoral losses of incumbents and mainstream parties more generally. The empirical analysis to study this relationship relies on an original semi‐automated protest event dataset combined with an updated dataset of electoral outcomes in 30 European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and point to a destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession.

A number of scientific models attempt to explain engagement and well-being at work. Some of them focus mostly on personality factors that can be activated, whereas others concentrate on the characteristics of the work environment and organisational context. In the present paper, we propose to integrate the organisational and individual antecedents of engagement and well-being at work in a single model termed “Positive Organisational Profile” (POP). The research aims to validate a French-language assessment tool bringing together personality resources, resources of the organisational environment, and resources of work role that determine engagement, performance, and well-being at work, using a large sample of French employees (N = 1 734). The results of confirmatory factor analyses support the structural validity of the new questionnaire with 18 scales showing good measurement reliability (α in the .73-.93 range). Multiple regression analyses reveal predictable associations of different types of resources at work with work engagement, work addiction, exhaustion, boredom, work satisfaction, work-life balance, and self-reported work performance. The POP model offers an integral overview of antecedents of organisational and individual flourishing at work. The new French-language questionnaire of resources POP can be used in research and in the practice of organisational development to inform interventions by identifying the potential drivers of positive change in teams.

Field experiments have provided ample evidence of ethnic and racial discrimination in the labour market. Less is known about how discrimination varies in multi-ethnic societies, where the ethnic composition of populations is different across locations. Inter-group contact and institutional arrangements for ethnic minorities can mitigate the sense of group threat and reduce discrimination. To provide empirical evidence of this, we conduct a field experiment of ethnic discrimination in Russia with a sample of over 9,000 job applications. We compare ethnically homogeneous cities and cities with ethnically mixed populations and privileged institutional status of ethnic minorities. We find strong discrimination against visible minorities in the former but much weaker discrimination in the latter. These findings demonstrate how institutions and historical contexts of inter-group relations can affect ethnic prejudice and discrimination.

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This paper discusses the current prospects of democracy in Europe from four perspectives: the birdʼs-eye view of long-term trends; the perspective of citizens’ support of democratic principles and their dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in their own countries; the voters’ perspective, which points to the rise of populist challengers in reaction to rising democratic dissatisfaction; and the elites’ perspective of populists in power. Overall, there is reason for concern, but no reason to dramatize. The long-term trends point to the expansion of democracy; the citizens’ support for democracy is still massive in Europe. At the same time, democratic dissatisfaction is widespread, giving rise to the surge of populist challengers from the left and the right. However, even if they gain power, populists meet with a large number of constraints that stabilize democracy.

Multilevel modeling (MLM, also known as hierarchical linear modeling, HLM) is a methodological frameworkwidely usedin the social sciences to analyze data with a hierarchical structure,where lower units of aggregation are ‘nested’ in higher units, including longitudinal data.In economics, however, MLM is usedvery rarely.Instead, economists use separate econometric techniques including cluster-robust standard errors and fixedeffects models. In this paper, we reviewthe methodological literature and contrast the econometrictechniques typically used in economics with the analysis ofhierarchical data using MLM. Ourreview suggests that economic techniques are generally lessconvenient, flexible, and efficientcompared to MLM. Theimportant limitation of MLM, however, isits inability to deal with the omitted variable problem at the lowest level of data, while standard economic techniques may be complemented by quasi-experimental methods mitigatingthis problem.It is unlikely, though, that this limitation can explain and justify the rare use of MLM in economics.Overall, we conclude that MLM has been unreasonably ignored in economics,and we encourage economists to apply this frameworkbyproviding ‘when and how’ guidelines.