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Abstract
It is common knowledge that in times of recession people lose confidence in the government and in other state institutions. Political scientists have pointed out that a loss of faith in a particular government or parliament does not necessarily amount to an erosion of civic culture as the cultural foundation of liberal democracy is broader. However, the recent recession has been unusually severe and long-lasting and some countries have only just started to climb out of it. It is an open question whether civic culture is so resilient that it can even weather exceptionally serious economic crises such as the recent one. As often happens in times of crisis, young people have been most affected by the recent crisis, and one may thus expect this age group to show the steepest drops in civic values. The current article examined the impact of the recession on the civic values of different generations across a selection of European and western states. Analyses of both short and long-term trends based on European Social Survey (ESS) and World Values Survey (WVS) data showed that social trust, tolerance, active civic participation and post-materialism values, as civic culture indicators, are not susceptible to economic downturns, confirming the idea that civic values need to be distinguished from political trust. Correlational analysis provided additional support for this finding as it showed no links between changes in civic culture indicators and changes in economic performance. However, civic dispositions were found to be related to overall levels of economic prosperity and performance, indicating that such dispositions are not wholly immune to material conditions. This led us to surmise that civic culture is more susceptible to enduring processes affecting people's life chances and well-being than to fleeting phenomena such as economic crises.

AbstractThis study reviews international comparative studies investigating people's views on inequality. These studies are classified using a framework consisting of three types of conceptions of inequality and two dimensions of inequality. Four perspectives are discussed explaining cross-national differences in views on inequality: the modernist, the culturalist, the micro and the macro perspective. The findings of studies comparing views on inequalities in post-communist and Western states provide more support for the modernist than for the culturalist perspective. Few comparative studies appear to investigate views on inequalities as independent variables impacting on other social attitudes and behaviours. It is argued that the social relevance of the field will be enhanced if more studies can show that views on inequality have an effect on social outcomes complementary to that of objective inequalities.

One of the greatest challenges currently facing the new states in Central and Eastern Europe is educational reform. After obtaining independence in the early 1990s, these states were confronted with the immense task of transforming an outdated centralized education system, which was aimed at delivering a loyal communist workforce, into a modern system that would be much more responsive to consumer demands and would recognize and further individual talent. The immensity of the undertaking lies in the fact that three discourses make simultaneous demands on the education system: nation building, democratization and globalization.

Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Learning political engagement -- Chapter 3. Access to forms of political learning -- Chapter 4. Social gaps in forms of learning and political engagement: 11-16 year olds in England -- Chapter 5. England in a comparative light: lower secondary -- Chapter 6. Learning political engagement in further and higher education in England -- Chapter 7. The Influence of Post-16 Education on Political Engagement: England Compared to Other States -- Chapter 8. Conclusions and implications for policy and practice

In an original, and highly interdisciplinary, mixed method approach, Green and Janmaat identify four major traditions of social cohesion in developed societies, analyzing how these various mechanisms are withstanding the strains of the current global financial crisis.