Second day of the International Workshop “Social Inequality and Polarization Value: A Cross-Country Perspective”

The second day of the workshop opened with a keynote by Malcolm Fairbrother (Umeå University; Institute for Futures Studies, Sweden) “Do We Value People Who Don't Exist Yet? Climate Change, Debt, and Attitudes towards Policies for Improving Future Lives”. The talk focused on environmental attitudes and the willingness to pay for future generations. A survey organized in Sweden, Spain, South Korea, and China demonstrated similarities and differences in the attitudes to “green policies” and to the measures that different states are planning to undertake to tackle climate change.

A session “Populism and Party Politics” followed that included presentations by the LCSR’s senior research fellow Boris Sokolov “The Dynamics of Value Cleavages in Europe: 1991-2018”, Christoph Nguyen (Free University of Berlin, Germany) “Angry, Anxious, and Populist? — The Affective Dynamics of Populist Party Support” and a joint study by Ivan Sumaneev(EUSPb, Russia) and Grigory Golosov (EUSPb, Russia) “The Rise of Populism and Party System Fragmentation in Europe”.

The afternoon session, “Cultural Shift and Voting Behavior”, featured talks by Björn Bremer (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Germany) “Are Voters Austerians? Evidence from Survey Experiments on Budgetary Preferences and Priorities”, LCSR research fellows Kirill Chmel, Aigul Mavletova and Evgeniya Mitrokhina “Willingness to Pay Taxes and Voluntary Donations to Solve the Landfill Crisis” and the LCSR’s deputy head Andrey Shcherbak “The Conservative Turn in Russia After 2012: Evidence from the ESS”. Björn Bremer presented the results of a survey experiment on attitudes to public debt and government spending in Germany which showed that voters do not support the idea of paying off the public debt by raising taxes or lower spending but support progressive taxes to cover additional government expenses. Another survey experiment, presented by Kirill Chmel, demonstrated that citizens of a Russian region would rather trust the regional government than federal authorities in dealing with man-made disasters. Andrey Shcherbak argued that the “conservative turn” in Russia was a result of the patriotic revival but by 2016, conservative attitudes returned to the pre-2014 levels.

The second day concluded with a keynote by Amy Alexander (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) titled “Are Women More Likely to Throw the Rascals Out? The Mobilizing Effect of Social Service Investment on Female Voters.” The talk focused on relationships between gender and corruption and showed that, when women go to vote, they are somewhat more likely to stop supporting politicians who have been involved in corruption scandals.

 

Reporters: Nikita Zubarev, Svetlana Koltunova.