Interdisciplinary methodological seminar at the Institute of Economics and Forecasting, Kyiv

On 13-15 September LCSR delegation visited their colleagues in Kyiv

Eduard Ponarin and three members of the LCSR team took part in round table discussion “Value aspects of modernization processes in modern society”, which was a part of interdisciplinary methodological seminar at the Institute of Economics and Forecasting, The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The main agenda of round table was discussion of quantitative and qualitative specificity of value transformation and its influence on modernization processes, as well as detection of the means of harmonization reconciling to the heterogeneity of society. The round table discussion attracted not only leading Ukrainian scientists, who deal with values studies, but also both young and experienced researchers, working in the fields of comparative political science and sociology.

Our staff presented the findings from their LCSR projects.

Eduard Ponarin reported on the study of dynamics of attitudes towards migrants in Europe. Using World Values Survey data, he verified two mechanisms of social change: generation shift and the diffusion of new values from elites to mass public. It was found that both mechanisms work. While generation effect is more or less the same in all European countries,the effect of social and economic status varies significantly among the countries.

Anna Nemirovskaya gave a talk on social tolerance in the core and frontier regions of several countries, focusing mainly on Russia. Anna presented some findings from collaborative project with Roberto Foa “Internal empires: social and political culture of the frontier”. In particular, the analysis of WVS data showed that the population of frontier zones in many countries differs in their social attitudes a lot, compared to the population of the core regions. For example, frontier population is more tolerant to people of other nationalities and labor migrants. Ukrainian audience admitted that the idea of distinguishing of core and frontier regions is very interesting and promising, as Ukraine itself can be considered as a frontier region and can be characterized by significant regional heterogeneity.

Kirill Zhirkov presented the project which deals with anti-Americanism – his main research topic in the lab. Specially for this discussion, he calculated the level of anti-Americanism for the regions in Russia and Ukraine. As it was supposed, Russian and Ukrainian regions vary significantly in anti-American attitudes. In Ukraine, the biggest variance is mostly notable in Eastern and Western regions – anti-Americanism in the East is considerably higher that in the West. However, Kyiv appeared to be the most pro-American region of Ukraine (politically and culturally) – it had one the lowest level on anti-Americanism in the world. As for Russia,  cultural anti-Americanism is mostly distributed in the South and Volga region, while political one – is intrinsic to the North-West of the country. Relatively pro-American region in is Russian Far East. On the whole, the analysis confirmed that significant region heterogeneity exists not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia.

Maria Ravlik made a presentation on the factors and value aspects of international migration. Maria has been working on this project for about a year, gradually adding new research questions. Recently she has included the issue of value aspects of international migrant flows to the scope of her project and she demonstrated the new results at this round table discussion.

On the whole, this methodological seminar was saturated with interesting discussions and dialogs – LCSR researchers were interested in comparison of the paths and dynamics of modernization processes in Russia and Ukraine. The round table format allowed Ukrainian and Russian colleagues to discuss the paths of development of value system, relying on their research findings.

As the outcome of the round table discussion in Kyiv, the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research and the Department of Monitoring Research of Socio-economic Transformations (the Institute of Economics and Forecasting, the Nation Academy of Sciences of Ukaine) has reached the agreement on joint publications of the round table materials, further cooperation and prospective participation of young Ukrainian researchers in collaborative projects within the LCSR research network.