Ekaterina Nastina Has Received a PhD in Sociology
Ekaterina Nastina, LCSR Junior Research Fellow, has received a PhD in Sociology. Congratualtions!
'Sociologists Need to Know How to Work Both with People and Data'
The Bachelor's programme 'Sociology and Social Informatics' is well suited to those interested in public processes, people's lives and data analysis. The programme offers state-funded places and fee-paying places for foreign students. We talked about the specifics and advantages of the programme with its academic supervisor Anna Nemirovskaya.
LCSR Researchers Got the Elizabeth H. Nelson Prize
Violetta Korsunova, Junior Research Fellow, and Boris Sokolov, Laboratory Head, have become the prizewinners of the Elizabeth H. Nelson Prize for the best paper from a society in transition. Laboratory's staff congratulates them on their victory and sincerely wishes them inspiration and success in their endeavours!
HSE University Reports New Findings on Links between Job Satisfaction and Life Satisfaction
Who finds happiness in their work? Now we have a better idea
‘Master’s in Comparative Social Research Is a Perfect Fit for My Academic Needs’
Aleena Khan, from Pakistan, is currently pursuing a master's in Comparative Social Research at HSE University, Moscow. Despite studying online in the first semester, she already feels part of the HSE student community. In her interview, Aleena talks about the admissions process, her favourite courses, and her general impressions.
11th LCSR International Workshop “Recent Advances in Comparative Study of Values”
The Ronald F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research of the National Research University Higher School of Economics announces a call for the 11th LCSR International Workshop “Recent Advances in Comparative Study of Values”, which will be held within the XXIII Yasin (April) International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development. It will take place in Moscow from the 4th till the 8th of April 2022.
Anna Almakaeva is a co-editor of a new book published by Springer
Springer series “Societies and Political Orders in Transition” is now completed with a new collective monograph “Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being: Insights from Cross-Cultural Studies” edited by Anna Almakaeva, Deputy Head at the Ronald F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (HSE University), Alejandro Moreno (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México — ITAM) and Rima Wilkes (University of British Columbia).
Eduard Ponarin Resigns as the Head of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research
Eduard Ponarin has decided to leave the position of the head of the Ronald F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research. Since October 1st, 2021, Boris Sokolov, Senior Research Fellow, has taken over the responsibility.
The 4th Annual IPSA–HSE Summer School for Methods of Political & Social Research
Department of Political Science and International Relations, HSE in St. Petersburg in association with the Ronald F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research and the International Political Science Association (IPSA) are continuing to accept applications for the 4th instalment of the IPSA–HSE Summer School for Methods of Political & Social Research. The School will be held online from August 9 to August 22, 2021.
Remembering Ronald Inglehart
Ronald Inglehart, the founding father of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, passed away on May 8th. Despite a serious illness, he worked until the last days of his life: last December, his book Religion's Sudden Decline was published by Oxford University Press, and in recent months he has been working on a new monograph on China. The death of the world-famous scientist was responded by the World Values Survey Association (WVSA), the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), the International Political Science Association (IPSA), the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), the University of Michigan, as well as many other organizations, associations and a huge number of colleagues around the world. The words of memory and recollections about Inglehart were also published by his colleagues from the LCSR, which has recently been named after him.
In press
Increased public awareness of environmental problems and the strengthening of diverse identities may lead to the emergence of “ethnic environmentalism.” These are movements that make environmental claims associated with the interests of an ethnic community. We develop this concept by examining protests in the Russian regions. Our findings suggest that ethnic identity facilitates environmental activism under the following conditions: the ethnic group claims a special cultural relationship to the natural environment; environmental concern and ethnic identity are linked to the unfair distribution of resources; and blame is directed toward regional actors, rather than the federal government.
Value polarization is one of the key factors in societal development. This research focuses on whether opinions concerning gender roles in the domestic and public spheres are polarized in European societies, a topic still under-investigated. Based on the fifth wave of European Values Study data (2017–2020), the study shows that gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere are more polarized than those in the public sphere. Polarization by education, level of income, migration background, and degree of religiosity is stronger for gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere, whereas polarization by gender is stronger for gender role attitudes in the public sphere. Both gender role attitudes in the public and domestic spheres are most strongly polarized by education. At the same time, belonging to a social group with higher education, higher income, and lower religiosity can promote more progressive views towards gender roles. Opinions in Eastern European countries tend to seem more polarized than in Western European countries, even if with some exceptions. In countries with a higher level of gender equality, the level of polarization is a bit lower, while in countries where there is a remarkable rise of anti-gender narratives, opponent and conflictual views are higher.
Belief systems are core organizing factors of social attitudes and behaviors, and their study has highlighted the role of conservatism as a contributing mechanism in mitigating concerns associated with change avoidance, as well as the reduction of uncertainty and ambiguity in life. Moreover, these aspects seem to be consistently used as powerful tools in the political and social discourse of the far-right. Life and death ethics are an example of issues that deal with the need for stability and control over personal and social life that people endorsing conservative values seek to attain. There is a rich line of studies on the individual and social explanatory factors of political conservatism, but less attention has been dedicated to moral conservatism as an autonomous and meaningful concept. The current research follows a multilevel approach to disentangle the individual and contextual correlates of conservative attitudes toward life and death. Thus, besides looking at the influence of individual choices related to religion and political orientation, this study also seeks to analyse the impact of the context, introducing in the model variables measuring economic performance, social and gender inequality, religious diversity and the prevalence of materialism and post-materialism values. Multilevel models using data from the 34 countries that participated in the last wave of the European Values Study (2017–2020), revealed an association between far-right orientation and conservative attitudes toward life and death, and that this relationship is moderated by materialism/post-materialism values, economic performance, and social inequality. Our findings reinforce the role of democracy as an environment where freedom of choice and thought are indisputable rights, cherished by most of the populations, regardless of their political position or their stance on moral issues.
In press
In recent years a number of environmental protests in Russian regions has been on the rise, despite the shrinking political opportunity structure. In Bashkortostan republic, the Bashkir Soda Company’s (BSC) decision to develop the Kushtau Hill for soda ash provoked an environmental campaign for saving the mountain. The Kushtau Hill movement succeeded, despite the highly repressive response from regional government and its tight patrimonial link to the BSC – two conditions identified in the literature as unfavorable to protesters. How environmental discontent is successfully mobilised under a repressive government and embedded extractive practices? Drawing on semi-structured interviews with activists, I trace two interlinked pathways to successful mobilisation. The first one tells a story about the role national organisations play in sustaining environmental collective action. Under a shrinking opportunity structure for formal ENGOs, the Bashkir national organisation “Bashkort” provided the emerging movement with experience of informal organisation. Its leadership successfully linked ethnic grievances to environmental mobilisation by claiming the Bashkirs’ special relation to the mountain. However, ethnic and neighbour ties do not prevent a repressive response from the regional government due to a limited scale of such mobilisation. The second story is told about framing processes that expand the scope of potential supporters beyond particularistic ties. Protesters came up with perceived costs of neopatrimonialism to justify their demands. This framing put the republic head as a scapegoat who secured interests of federal centre and BSC, compromising the residents’ ecological well-being. Therefore, Kushtau Hill activists attracted new members, not putting themselves into danger of being perceived as extremists that targeted a regime-dimension.
In press
This article studies the attitude of modern Russian conservatives to the “green agenda”. Even though the topic of ecology was initially considered a priority for left-wing parties and movements, in recent years European right-wing politicians have become more active in discussing and using environmental issues to increase their popularity. If the typical leftist “green agenda” largely focused on global issues, for example, climate change, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, energy transition, then right populists, denying the importance of the proposed environmental policy, proposed focusing on local problems: preserving native nature, maintaining national control over natural resources. We are seeing this trend now in Russia: domestic conservatives are actively discussing the “green agenda”, offering their vision of assessments and ways to solve environmental problems. In this article we set two tasks. First, we show that Western and Russian conservative discourses have more similarities than differences. In addition, it is shown that domestic conservatives, not being a single community, have different views on the origins and ways of solving environmental problems. The domestic “green” conservative discourse is heterogeneous; it goes back to both the origins of the Russian environmental movement and the European right. Secondly, we are trying to find out whether the views of conservatives influence environmental policy in Russia. To do this, we are studying data on supported presidential grants on environmental topics for 2018-22. In total, more than four thousand applications were examined, which were analyzed on several grounds. The results of the analysis show that local projects predominate. In addition, patriotic organizations are becoming involved in environmental issues, and a number of environmental organizations are beginning to deliberately use patriotic rhetoric. The results obtained allow us to make a cautious conclusion that traces of conservative attitudes can be traced in environmental policy.
In press
The environmental movement in Russia has been one of the most institutionalized forms of collective action. Originating from the Soviet period and gaining momentum in the late 1980s, it survived the 1990s’ dramatic transformations as well as the changes in political opportunity structure in 2000-2010s. Extant scholarship on environmental activism in Russia has been largely focused on case-studies of regional mass-mobilization, such as environmental campaigns at Shiyes station in Archangelsk. The paper represents the first systematic study of cross-regional variance in environmental collective action in Russia. Drawing on three datasets, we trace the general evolution of environmental protests in the period from 2007 to 2021 and provide a typology of Russian regions. The latter allows us to classify Russian regions by intensity and sustainability of eco-mobilisation. We demonstrate that, despite closing opportunities, the intensity of environmental protests during the last decade has been on the rise. The typology allows us to describe the existing variance and bring forward new questions on the nature and factors of environmental protest activity in Russian regions.
In recent years, environmental protests have intensified in Russian regions.
At the same time, the level of protest activity in the population is not directly dependent
on the degree of environmental threats but is due to various political and social factors.
According to researchers, one of the main factors contributing to the mobilization of the
population is regional identity. In this paper, we analyze why regional identity is important
and what elements are actualized in the process of environmental mobilization in the
Russian regions. The results of the study show that mobilization was based on such
components of collective identity as the opposition of regions to the center, peripherality,
ethnicity, and historical past. The environmental agenda turned out to be significant in
conjunction with perceptions of social injustice. Natural objects were considered by local
residents from the perspective of their social Environmental problems were mainly
presented as threats to national culture, traditional ways of life, religious, and culturalhistorical
objects. At the same time, global environmental values were articulated mainly
by professional ecologists. In addition, in some cases, a strong collective identity could
contribute to environmental demobilization and resistance to those environmental
projects that conflicted with the interests of the local population. Thus, grassroots
environmental mobilization in Russia is mainly associated with ideas about the uneven
distribution of resources and survival values.
After Hofstede proposed individualism-collectivism (IDV-COLL) as a dimension of national culture, numerous studies have used that name to refer to individual-level psychological constructs, based on theories and empirical operationalizations that are not necessarily compatible with the Hofstede tradition. This has created confusion. In this study, we investigate whether the two revised Minkov-Hofstede dimensions of national culture - IDV-COLL and “flexibility-monumentalism” (FLX-MON) - have individual-level counterparts and if they are isomorphic (have the same structure at both levels of analysis). We find that the three main conceptual facets of national COLL (conformism, ascendancy, and exclusionism) and the three of MON (self-esteem, self-stability, and generosity) materialize as six independent individual-level dimensions in a nationally representative sample from Mongolia (n = 1500). This structure emerged in a confirmatory factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and hierarchical cluster analyses. This is the first series of analyses of the structure of the individual-level ingredients of national IDV-COLL and FLX-MON.
Numerous studies show that prosocial behavior leads to positive emotional outcomes for the actor, yet does it matter, who the beneficiary is? The present paper explores differential effects of helping acts towards close versus distant recipients on subjective well-being and the role that basic psychological needs play in this relationship. Two studies using event-recall (N = 127) and interventional (N = 305) designs in Russian samples were conducted to test our hypotheses. Study 1 showed that performing acts of kindness towards family and friends (compared to a control condition) led to higher satisfaction of the needs for relatedness and morality, while helping strangers increased only the latter. Study 2 failed to unconditionally replicate the prosocial-happiness link; however, when the need for competence was controlled for, helping both types of recipients was shown to provide higher event-level well-being outcomes. The positive effect of prosocial acts toward strong ties was mediated by relatedness and morality satisfaction, while when the recipient was a stranger, the effect was accounted for by fulfilling the needs for morality and autonomy. No significant event-level well-being differences were detected between those helping close versus distant others and no differences in positive affect, negative affect or life satisfaction emerged between the three conditions. The paper provides support for the importance of the self-perceived impact for the success of kindness interventions. We conclude with a discussion of implications for kindness interventions towards different recipients.
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In Russian:
Лаборатория сравнительных социальных исследований, Национальный исследовательский университет «Высшая школа экономики».
In English:
Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation.
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In Russian:
Статья/монография/глава подготовлена в ходе/в результате проведения исследования/работы в рамках Программы фундаментальных исследований Национального исследовательского университета «Высшая школа экономики» (НИУ ВШЭ).
In English:
The article/book chapter/book was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program.