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Are the forces of habit and democratic decision-making so strong that outcomes are judged as legitimate whatever they are? This study examines whether the public's consent to welfare state solidarity and its choices of justice principles are related to the specifics of welfare state regimes

Are the forces of habit and democratic decision-making so strong that outcomes are judged as legitimate whatever they are? This study examines whether the public's consent to welfare state solidarity and its choices of justice principles are related to the specifics of welfare state regimes.

The differences in public support for environmental protection among individuals from 50 nations were investigated. Support was determined by the willingness of individuals to make financial sacrifices to protect the environment. The results from multilevel analyses indicated that significant variance exists within and among nations in the level of support. The contextual-level variance was to a substantial degree explained by individual-level variables, capturing compositional effects. Income, postmaterialism, educational attainment, environmental involvement, and age related directly to support for environmental protection. Contextual-level variables—GDP, GDP growth, and average postmaterialist value-orientation of publics—also related directly to levels of support among nations and explained a significant part of the contextual-level variance. The findings are congruent with the affluence hypothesis and Inglehart's subjective values hypothesis. They also point to the necessity of simultaneously assessing the effects of individual- and contextual-level characteristics on proenvironmental attitudes in cross-national research.

The increase in international survey research projects investigating basic orientations reveals that the grand sociological theories fall short in explaining the often large differences between populations in contemporary societies that continue to exist. There is more than modernization to explain varieties. Institutions, culture, history, policies, all appear to affect people's values. Our review of current state-of-the-art cross-national research activities demonstrates that increasingly multilevel analysis techniques are applied to address either modernization or institutionalism, or both. From various theoretical perspectives, hypotheses are extracted about the impact of the context on values in aspecific domain. The selected studies include very different contextual features to explain varieties in domain-specific value orientations, which clearly proves that there are different mechanisms at work in the distinct value domains. The studies reveal that context matters, but also that it is essential to include individual-level characteristics, at least as controls. Quite often, the individual attributes appear differently distributed in different countries, which may be the main reason why differences in value orientations between countries remain. ZusammenfassungDie Zunahme an internationalen Umfrageforschungsprojekten, die grundlegende Wertorientierungen untersuchen, zeigt, dass die gro ss en soziologischen Theorien nicht ausreichen, um die oft gro ss en Unterschiede zwischen den Bevolkerungen in heutigen Gesellschaften zu erklaren. Es gibt mehr als nur Modernisierung, um die Unterschiede zu erklaren. Institutionen, Kultur, Geschichte und Politik scheinen alle die Werte der Menschen zu beeinflussen. Die vorliegende uberprufung der aktuellen internationalen landerubergreifenden Forschungsaktivitaten zeigt, dass zunehmend Mehrebenenanalysen verwendet werden, um entweder Modernisierung oder Institutionalismus oder beide theoretischen Ansatze gemeinsam zu untersuchen. Aus verschiedenen theoretischen Perspektiven werden Hypothesen uber die Auswirkungen des Kontexts auf Werte in einem bestimmten Lebensbereich generiert. Die ausgewahlten Studien untersuchen sehr unterschiedliche kontextuelle Merkmale, um die Varianz domanenspezifischer Wertorientierungen zu erklaren, was eindeutig belegt, dass unterschiedliche Mechanismen in den verschiedenen Lebensbereichen wirken. Die Studien zeigen, dass Kontext von Bedeutung ist, aber auch, dass es notwendig ist, Merkmale auf individueller Ebene zu berucksichtigen, zumindest als Kontrollvariablen. Haufig sind die individuellen Merkmale in den verschiedenen Landern unterschiedlich verteilt, was der Hauptgrund dafur sein kann, dass Unterschiede in den Wertorientierungen zwischen den Landern bestehen.

Several studies have examined the impact of earlier children on fertility decisions in second unions. These studies are guided by two hypotheses: the parenthood hypothesis, which argues that people want to have children to become a parent, and the commitment hypothesis, which argues that people want to have children to confirm the union. Because people often enter a second union while already having a prior child, recohabitation— which refers here to both unmarried and married new unions—is an ideal case for testing these hypotheses. Using data from the survey Divorce in The Netherlands, we test the validity of these two hypotheses. In addition, we extend comparisons from second unions to first marriages and we develop hypotheses about the effect of divorce on subsequent fertility. The findings support the argument that attaining parenthood in recohabitation is more important than having a child to cement the new union. Women who are recohabiting with a prior child are less likely of having a first birth in the new union than women who are recohabiting without a prior child. This applies less clearly to men and effects differ depending on the number, age, and residence status of the children. We also find evidence for our hypothesis about the effect of divorce. More specifically, recohabiting women without a child are more likely to have a child than first married women. For men, no such effect could be found. Our interpretation is that recohabiting women are catching up missed fertility opportunities in their first marriage, even though their total fertility remains lower as a result of age restrictions.

This paper surveys the debate regarding Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare states and reviews the modified or alternative typologies ensuing from this debate. We confine ourselves to the classifications which have been developed by Esping-Andersen's critics in order to cope with the following alleged shortcomings of his typology: (1) the misspecification of the Mediterranean welfare states as immature Continental ones; (2) the labelling of the Antipodean welfare states as belonging to the `liberal' regime type; (3) a neglect of the gender-dimension in social policy. We reconstruct several typologies of welfare states in order to establish, first, whether real welfare states are quite similar to others or whether they are rather unique specimens, and, second, whether there are three ideal-typical worlds of welfare capitalism or more. We conclude that real welfare states are hardly ever pure types and are usually hybrid cases; and that the issue of ideal-typical welfare states cannot be satisfactorily answered given the lack of formal theorizing and the still inconclusive outcomes of comparative research. In spite of this conclusion there is plenty of reason to continue to work on and with the original or modified typologies.

When evaluating the various aspects of the welfare state, people assess some aspects more positively than others. Following a multidimensional approach, this study systematically argues for a framework composed of seven dimensions of the welfare state, which are subject to the opinions of the public. Using confirmatory factor analyses, this conceptual framework of multidimensional welfare attitudes was tested on cross-national data from 22 countries participating in the 2008 European Social Survey. According to our empirical analysis, attitudes towards the welfare state are multidimensional; in general, people are very positive about the welfare state's goals and range, while simultaneously being critical of its efficiency, effectiveness and policy outcomes. We found that these dimensions relate to each other differently in different countries. Eastern/Southern Europeans combine a positive attitude towards the goals and role of government with a more critical attitude towards the welfare state's efficiency and policy outcomes. In contrast, Western/Northern Europeans' attitudes towards the various welfare state dimensions are based partly on a fundamentally positive or negative stance towards the welfare state.