Conference Agenda

New methods and data sources confirm that income and wealth inequalities have continued to increase over the last three decades. The level of perceived inequality influences the demand for economic redistribution, but it is not the only factor at work in the mental map of attitudes towards redistribution. Beliefs about the source of inequality are key to understanding the desired level of redistribution. People who believe that inequality arises from differences in effort will tend to demand less redistribution, while those who believe that inequality is due to differences in circumstances beyond the control of individuals will tend to demand more redistribution. Similarly, earlier studies regularly found that political ideology was an important predictor of attitudes towards redistribution, but recent evidence suggests that both those who consider themselves on the left and those who consider themselves on the right advocate more redistribution. This call seeks to explain with ESS data and other international values surveys (WVS, EVS, ISSP, etc.) new trends in predictors of attitudes towards redistribution. Particular emphasis is placed on cross-national studies using ESS data and other surveys together with time-varying national statistics. These statistics are primarily variables about the level of different forms economic inequality and parameters of the tax schedule (such as tax incidence, progressivity, tax rate levels, etc. Two special ESS modules about fairness and social justice views of ESS fielded in 2008 and 2016 are also of key importance for this call as they allow including several beliefs on the analysis of attitudes towards redistribution across time and country.

Chairs: Anja-Kristin Abendroth (Bielefeld University), Tanja van der Lippe (Utrecht University), Judith Treas (University of California Irvine) Information and communication technologies and the extension of digital infrastructures increasingly allow for digital social contacts in work and family life. Moreover, the global COVID-19 pandemic, with social distancing measures in place, increased the experiences with digital social contacts with colleagues and supervisors as well as family members. The implications for workplace flexibility in time, place and employment contract as well as family relationship quality are highly debated. An optimistic scenario foresees improved maintenance of existing relationships and improved flexible adaption of the work and family spheres. A more pessimistic perspective suggests that digital social contacts erode social capital, involve more precarious work contracts and/or result in a blurring of boundaries between work and family life fostering conflicts between the life domains. Empirical evidence, typically based on small-scale, single country studies, has yielded mixed findings, suggesting that social circumstances produce different effects. Opportunities-based arguments from research on the digital social divide point to differences in home and workplace access to digital communication and digital capacities from state investments in technology and skill development. Needs-based arguments refer to restrictions on face-to-face contact due to geographic distance, living arrangements, teleworking or long work hours--all differing between countries/regions depending on employment rates, welfare and labor protections, or family policies. Following trust-based arguments, the generalized trust, openness, and privacy policies of countries reflect privacy concerns limiting the use of digital communication and the digital exchange of support and appreciation. Influence-based arguments address individuals’ agency to limit the costs involved in digital communication, depending on country context and work or family cultures. The session on DSC invites contributions on the respective module on “Digital Social Contexts in Work and Family Life” in the ESS Round 10 on the following guiding questions: Does digital social contact in work and family life, its evaluation, and consequences differ between European countries and to what extent can these differences be explained by differences in digital infrastructures, national policies, demographic composition, and economic circumstances? Are there gender, parenthood, migration and class-specific patterns of digital social contacts in the spheres of work and family or their interfaces? How does digital social contact shape relationship quality, well-being, resources and demands in work, family and/or community as well as the intersection of these life spheres? Does digital social contact mitigate or reinforce gender or other social inequalities in the family or workforce?

The module on attitudes to immigration has been fielded in the 1st and the 7th rounds of the ESS, and it is going to be fielded again in Round 12. This module has been widely used by academics and policy makers, and the topic remains highly salient for theory, research and political debates. The key questions from the previous modules which have been the most widely used include the measurement of attitudes toward different immigrant groups, realistic and symbolic threat, contact quantity and quality with immigrants, social distance, subjective group size, conditions to accept immigrants, fraternal deprivation, or racism, just to name a few. A small number of core items on immigration have been asked in every round of the European Social Survey. In this session we invite researchers to present their ongoing research on attitudes toward immigration and related topics using ESS data, particularly (but not necessarily) from a comparative perspective.

The CROss-National Online Survey 2 (CRONOS-2) panel is the world’s first large-scale cross-national probability-based online panel following an input-harmonised approach – panel recruitment, setup, maintenance, and data processing were guided by the same methodological principles in all participating countries. The panel was conducted in 12 countries: Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The CRONOS-2 project capitalised on an existing probability-based face-to-face survey to establish a probability-based sample for the web panel. After completing the ESS Round 10 face-to-face interview, respondents aged over 18 and with internet access were invited to participate in six 20-minute online surveys, along with an additional short Welcome Survey. Four of these main waves (Wave 1, Wave 2, Wave 4, and Wave 5), were cross-national waves, with identical questions asked across all participating countries. Wave 3 and Wave 6 were country-specific waves, allowing individual countries to design their own questionnaires. The data collected online can be merged with the ESS Round 10 dataset creating a larger dataset that includes both online data and data from the ESS face-to-face interview. This session includes papers that use CRONOS-2 data, either alone or in combination with the ESS data.

Round 10 of the European Social Survey (2021-2022) included a rotating module on European’s understandings and evaluations of democracy, largely replicating a previous module applied in Round 6 (2012- 2013). At the time, Europe was going through one of deepest economic and financial crises on record. However, the results and their analysis showed that, in spite of very large variations in how Europeans evaluated the performance of their democracies, the way they conceived “democracy” pointed to a widespread support for liberal and electoral institutions, even if complemented with equally important demands for economic equality and, to a lesser extent, for opportunities for a direct say in policymaking through referendums and initiatives. A lot has happened in the following decade, including a refugee crisis, referendums with unprecedented outcomes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, accompanied by an underlying expansion of EU intervention in domestic politics. At the same time, radical right-wing parties have seen their electoral fortunes improve all over the continent, as the use of populist rhetoric deepened and increased. In countries such as Hungary and Poland, full fledged populist governance and a rule-of-law crisis has taken hold, with both domestic and Europe-wide consequences. How have these developments affected Europeans’ views and evaluations of democracy? This session welcomes paper submissions addressing how views and evaluations of democracy in Europe can be mapped today and how they - and their underlying sources - have changed in this last decade, resorting to the rich and high-quality data of ESS’s Round 6 and 10. For Round 10, the original module was adapted to allow the measurement of conceptions and evaluations not only along the liberal democratic, direct democratic, and social democratic dimensions, but also along the dimension of populist democracy, a view that stresses vertical over horizontal accountability and a unrestrained responsiveness to a sovereign “people”. How has this enriched our knowledge about how Europeans understand “democracy” and evaluate the performance of their regimes? We welcome papers both on the substantive topic - conceptions and evaluations of democracy in Europe, their causes and implications - and on the methodological challenges involved in assessing them.

General population surveys are currently challenged by several societal developments, such as budget constraints and the respondents’ more active lifestyle, which leads to a lower contact success rate and higher costs in interviewer-based survey designs. At the same time, internet penetration rates are increasing fast and steadily. General population surveys are therefore pushed to innovating the design and several experiments on different designs for fielding a general population survey on the web have been fielded for more than a decade now. Survey methodologists study mode effects between interviewer-based and web/paper self-completion for over a decade. For example, Switzerland has fielded a comprehensive mixed-mode experiment using the European Social Survey (ESS) in 2012, a complex experiment on push-to-web designs using the European Values Study has been fielded in six countries in 2017 and during the pandemic, the ESS has been fielded as a self-completion web/paper survey in several countries in 2021. Given the change towards self-completion of the ESS in 2027, several experiments based on the ESS questionnaire have been fielded or are in the field. This session welcomes contributions that show the effects of a mode switch on results of general population surveys with a special focus on changes over time. This includes two types of research questions: effects of a mode-switch on time-series data as well as the changes in effects of a mode-switch over time. The first type of research questions includes how to demonstrate a mode effect in a time-series, how to correct for mode effects, how to visualize time-series with a mode change in-between and many more. The second type of research questions includes changes over time in under- or overrepresentation of specific groups in the population, changes in, or persistency of, mode effects regarding some variables or change in the share of paper vs. web participation, mobile participation etc. We welcome contributions based on ESS data but also based on any other general population survey that provides insights into the effect of switching from an interviewer-based to a self-completion survey relevant to the mode-switch of ESS foreseen in 2027 (e.g., including items and concepts used also in the ESS, such as trust, attitudes towards democracy, immigration, family, or welfare state).

Trust is widely considered the glue that binds society together, spanning scales from the individual to institutional to continental. Trust has many forms, including social and political, and can be universal as well as particular. The ESS data has amassed public opinion data on numerous measures of trust that allow examination of its composition, level, and distribution, along with its sources and consequences. Its broad temporal range combined with pan-European focus enables comparative testing of hypotheses about the reach of trust. For instance, is trust in strangers a universal moral value (Uslaner 2002, 2018), how likely are forms of trust to spill over to other domains given national, cultural, or temporal contexts, and how does particularized trust relate with and potentially translate to other types of trust, including more generalized forms (Reeskens and Hooghe 2008; Newton, Stolle, and Zmerli 2018). We invite papers on topics encompassing social and political trust that seek to describe its many realizations across the landscape as well as to compare them using innovative methods. We welcome contributions, for example, including trust in other individuals, organizations, institutions, and the social order over time and across places. Although multi-country studies are especially encouraged, single country studies with a comparative lens will also be considered. Examples include, for instance, normative and instrumental aspects of political trust such as institutional legitimacy, government performance (Levi and Stoker 2000), evaluations of how political institutions and actors fulfill their obligations to the social and political order, trust in others, trustworthiness of societies and social systems (Putnam 2000), and the relationship between diversity and social trust (Ziller 2015).

Value orientations are significant factors in understanding different attitudes, beliefs and behavior. ESS data provides an opportunity to test this notion across nations and over time. The construct of values is central to different fields in the social sciences and humanities (Sagiv, et al., 2017). Therefore, researchers from various disciplines can contribute to knowledge about this topic. Moreover, practitioners are interested in value orientations as understanding them helps to predict human behavior. With reference to Sagiv and Schwartz (2022), values serve as guiding principles in people’s lives. Finally, discussion about the mechanisms that link values to behavior is still ongoing. ESS data could meaningfully contribute to this discussion with the analysis of direct or indirect effects of human values to various patterns of attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors in Europe. So, we invite researchers from social sciences and humanities to propose their presentations to the section ‘’Value orientations in the study of lives across nations and over time‘‘ in ESS conference. We hope to provide answers to such questions as 1) if particular values and higher order value orientations are stable over time and across nations, how it could be explained; 2) what links between value orientations and attitudes, beliefs, behavior are the strongest; 3) what mechanisms could explain the links among values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior the best; 4) how value orientations contribute to the pursuit and fulfilment of sustainable development goals. Insights from the presentations will be a valuable input to research development and practical recommendations.

Since its inception in 2001, the European Social Survey aimed to ‘promote and practice the highest standards in cross-national research’. Its survey methodology has been widely recognised as excellent, with its firm emphasis on input harmonisation, the use of best practice, transparency, and effective central coordination. A key part of the ESS methodology has been the use of a single mode of data collection for the questionnaire, required to prevent different mode influencing survey responses in different ways, within and across the various countries taking part in the survey. The mode chosen by the founders of the ESS was face-to-face in-home interviewers, felt in 2002 to be the ‘gold standard’ as well as the only mode that could realistically be used in every participating ESS country.
In 2027 the ESS will no longer use face-to-face interviewing for its data collection instead offering web and paper self-completion questionnaires in all countries. Its 2025 round will compare the old and new modes in a split ballot design. This change, brought forward by the COVID-19 pandemic, has been driven by a number of factors, including: improved quality of self-completion data collection; declining quality of face-to-face data collection; and the near collapse of face-to-face interviewing capacity in many countries in Europe.
Fitzgerald will outline the new ESS self-completion data collection methodology, showing how the approach was developed and presenting data about the quality of the new mode compared to the face-to-face approach. The expected impact of the mode change on data quality and the survey time series will be discussed. The presentation will conclude on a positive note arguing that that the benefits of the new self-completion approach outweigh the negatives and provide a solid basis for high quality comparative ESS data collection for the future.
Following the presentation the ESS ERIC Director will host a roundtable discussion where survey methodologists and substantive cross-national scholars, discus the challenges and opportunities that this once in a generation methodological change brings to the infrastructure and its community of users.

New methods and data sources confirm that income and wealth inequalities have continued to increase over the last three decades. The level of perceived inequality influences the demand for economic redistribution, but it is not the only factor at work in the mental map of attitudes towards redistribution. Beliefs about the source of inequality are key to understanding the desired level of redistribution. People who believe that inequality arises from differences in effort will tend to demand less redistribution, while those who believe that inequality is due to differences in circumstances beyond the control of individuals will tend to demand more redistribution. Similarly, earlier studies regularly found that political ideology was an important predictor of attitudes towards redistribution, but recent evidence suggests that both those who consider themselves on the left and those who consider themselves on the right advocate more redistribution. This call seeks to explain with ESS data and other international values surveys (WVS, EVS, ISSP, etc.) new trends in predictors of attitudes towards redistribution. Particular emphasis is placed on cross-national studies using ESS data and other surveys together with time-varying national statistics. These statistics are primarily variables about the level of different forms economic inequality and parameters of the tax schedule (such as tax incidence, progressivity, tax rate levels, etc. Two special ESS modules about fairness and social justice views of ESS fielded in 2008 and 2016 are also of key importance for this call as they allow including several beliefs on the analysis of attitudes towards redistribution across time and country.

Chairs: Anja-Kristin Abendroth (Bielefeld University), Tanja van der Lippe (Utrecht University), Judith Treas (University of California Irvine) Information and communication technologies and the extension of digital infrastructures increasingly allow for digital social contacts in work and family life. Moreover, the global COVID-19 pandemic, with social distancing measures in place, increased the experiences with digital social contacts with colleagues and supervisors as well as family members. The implications for workplace flexibility in time, place and employment contract as well as family relationship quality are highly debated. An optimistic scenario foresees improved maintenance of existing relationships and improved flexible adaption of the work and family spheres. A more pessimistic perspective suggests that digital social contacts erode social capital, involve more precarious work contracts and/or result in a blurring of boundaries between work and family life fostering conflicts between the life domains. Empirical evidence, typically based on small-scale, single country studies, has yielded mixed findings, suggesting that social circumstances produce different effects. Opportunities-based arguments from research on the digital social divide point to differences in home and workplace access to digital communication and digital capacities from state investments in technology and skill development. Needs-based arguments refer to restrictions on face-to-face contact due to geographic distance, living arrangements, teleworking or long work hours--all differing between countries/regions depending on employment rates, welfare and labor protections, or family policies. Following trust-based arguments, the generalized trust, openness, and privacy policies of countries reflect privacy concerns limiting the use of digital communication and the digital exchange of support and appreciation. Influence-based arguments address individuals’ agency to limit the costs involved in digital communication, depending on country context and work or family cultures. The session on DSC invites contributions on the respective module on “Digital Social Contexts in Work and Family Life” in the ESS Round 10 on the following guiding questions: Does digital social contact in work and family life, its evaluation, and consequences differ between European countries and to what extent can these differences be explained by differences in digital infrastructures, national policies, demographic composition, and economic circumstances? Are there gender, parenthood, migration and class-specific patterns of digital social contacts in the spheres of work and family or their interfaces? How does digital social contact shape relationship quality, well-being, resources and demands in work, family and/or community as well as the intersection of these life spheres? Does digital social contact mitigate or reinforce gender or other social inequalities in the family or workforce?

The module on attitudes to immigration has been fielded in the 1st and the 7th rounds of the ESS, and it is going to be fielded again in Round 12. This module has been widely used by academics and policy makers, and the topic remains highly salient for theory, research and political debates. The key questions from the previous modules which have been the most widely used include the measurement of attitudes toward different immigrant groups, realistic and symbolic threat, contact quantity and quality with immigrants, social distance, subjective group size, conditions to accept immigrants, fraternal deprivation, or racism, just to name a few. A small number of core items on immigration have been asked in every round of the European Social Survey. In this session we invite researchers to present their ongoing research on attitudes toward immigration and related topics using ESS data, particularly (but not necessarily) from a comparative perspective.

Since its inception, the South European Network (SEN), composed by Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, has aimed to identify shared issues and collaborative solutions. In this session, we invite researchers from the SEN countries and beyond, to showcase their work, addressing the profound societal challenges Europe is confronting. Against the backdrop of these challenges, scholars who have conducted research utilizing ESS data are invited to address topics including but not limited to climate change, democracy, immigration, digitalization, pandemic-related concerns, gender dynamics, rising living costs, demographic aging, and escalating health disparities. This session presents a valuable opportunity to delve into the similarities, differences, and potential unique profiles of the SEN countries, in comparison to other ESS participating countries. Papers may employ a methodological or substantive approach and focus on longitudinal or single-round ESS data.

Round 10 of the European Social Survey (2021-2022) included a rotating module on European’s understandings and evaluations of democracy, largely replicating a previous module applied in Round 6 (2012- 2013). At the time, Europe was going through one of deepest economic and financial crises on record. However, the results and their analysis showed that, in spite of very large variations in how Europeans evaluated the performance of their democracies, the way they conceived “democracy” pointed to a widespread support for liberal and electoral institutions, even if complemented with equally important demands for economic equality and, to a lesser extent, for opportunities for a direct say in policymaking through referendums and initiatives. A lot has happened in the following decade, including a refugee crisis, referendums with unprecedented outcomes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, accompanied by an underlying expansion of EU intervention in domestic politics. At the same time, radical right-wing parties have seen their electoral fortunes improve all over the continent, as the use of populist rhetoric deepened and increased. In countries such as Hungary and Poland, full fledged populist governance and a rule-of-law crisis has taken hold, with both domestic and Europe-wide consequences. How have these developments affected Europeans’ views and evaluations of democracy? This session welcomes paper submissions addressing how views and evaluations of democracy in Europe can be mapped today and how they - and their underlying sources - have changed in this last decade, resorting to the rich and high-quality data of ESS’s Round 6 and 10. For Round 10, the original module was adapted to allow the measurement of conceptions and evaluations not only along the liberal democratic, direct democratic, and social democratic dimensions, but also along the dimension of populist democracy, a view that stresses vertical over horizontal accountability and a unrestrained responsiveness to a sovereign “people”. How has this enriched our knowledge about how Europeans understand “democracy” and evaluate the performance of their regimes? We welcome papers both on the substantive topic - conceptions and evaluations of democracy in Europe, their causes and implications - and on the methodological challenges involved in assessing them.

General population surveys are currently challenged by several societal developments, such as budget constraints and the respondents’ more active lifestyle, which leads to a lower contact success rate and higher costs in interviewer-based survey designs. At the same time, internet penetration rates are increasing fast and steadily. General population surveys are therefore pushed to innovating the design and several experiments on different designs for fielding a general population survey on the web have been fielded for more than a decade now. Survey methodologists study mode effects between interviewer-based and web/paper self-completion for over a decade. For example, Switzerland has fielded a comprehensive mixed-mode experiment using the European Social Survey (ESS) in 2012, a complex experiment on push-to-web designs using the European Values Study has been fielded in six countries in 2017 and during the pandemic, the ESS has been fielded as a self-completion web/paper survey in several countries in 2021. Given the change towards self-completion of the ESS in 2027, several experiments based on the ESS questionnaire have been fielded or are in the field. This session welcomes contributions that show the effects of a mode switch on results of general population surveys with a special focus on changes over time. This includes two types of research questions: effects of a mode-switch on time-series data as well as the changes in effects of a mode-switch over time. The first type of research questions includes how to demonstrate a mode effect in a time-series, how to correct for mode effects, how to visualize time-series with a mode change in-between and many more. The second type of research questions includes changes over time in under- or overrepresentation of specific groups in the population, changes in, or persistency of, mode effects regarding some variables or change in the share of paper vs. web participation, mobile participation etc. We welcome contributions based on ESS data but also based on any other general population survey that provides insights into the effect of switching from an interviewer-based to a self-completion survey relevant to the mode-switch of ESS foreseen in 2027 (e.g., including items and concepts used also in the ESS, such as trust, attitudes towards democracy, immigration, family, or welfare state).

Trust is widely considered the glue that binds society together, spanning scales from the individual to institutional to continental. Trust has many forms, including social and political, and can be universal as well as particular. The ESS data has amassed public opinion data on numerous measures of trust that allow examination of its composition, level, and distribution, along with its sources and consequences. Its broad temporal range combined with pan-European focus enables comparative testing of hypotheses about the reach of trust. For instance, is trust in strangers a universal moral value (Uslaner 2002, 2018), how likely are forms of trust to spill over to other domains given national, cultural, or temporal contexts, and how does particularized trust relate with and potentially translate to other types of trust, including more generalized forms (Reeskens and Hooghe 2008; Newton, Stolle, and Zmerli 2018). We invite papers on topics encompassing social and political trust that seek to describe its many realizations across the landscape as well as to compare them using innovative methods. We welcome contributions, for example, including trust in other individuals, organizations, institutions, and the social order over time and across places. Although multi-country studies are especially encouraged, single country studies with a comparative lens will also be considered. Examples include, for instance, normative and instrumental aspects of political trust such as institutional legitimacy, government performance (Levi and Stoker 2000), evaluations of how political institutions and actors fulfill their obligations to the social and political order, trust in others, trustworthiness of societies and social systems (Putnam 2000), and the relationship between diversity and social trust (Ziller 2015).

Social policies increasingly focus on enhancing population wellbeing, and it is becoming more common to quantify the progress made toward greater human wellbeing and investigate its determinants using psychological variables such as life satisfaction, emotions, basic psychological needs, and feelings of meaning and purpose. Pioneering research from the fields of psychology and economics have concentrated on intra-individual (e.g., socio-economic or demographic) factors or the impact of the social environment (e.g., markers of social cohesion or socio-economic deprivation), while recent research from diverse fields, including sociology and geography also assess the effects of environmental contexts on wellbeing (e.g., the impact of ongoing climate change on wellbeing and mental health are already very noticeable in several ways). The European Social Survey has been at the forefront of measuring subjective wellbeing and is unique in offering data suitable to almost all disciplines and their differing perspectives on wellbeing. Since its inception, satisfaction and happiness questions and indicators of social wellbeing ("social capital") have been included in every wave of the survey. In addition, the ESS collected more in-depth psychological wellbeing reports in 2006 and 2012. For Round 12 (2025), a repeat of this more comprehensive personal and social wellbeing module is planned. We want to use the 2024 ESS conference as an opportunity to bring together academics from different fields to discuss the most recent research on personal and social wellbeing using ESS data and to explore the opportunities arising from the repeat module. We are interested in eliciting research that uses the ESS wellbeing data from various perspectives. For example, we are interested in research that makes use of the ability to link ESS data with economic and sociodemographic data (which may be at national and subnational scales), assess rural-urban differences in wellbeing, or research that uses detailed wellbeing measures in the ESS to answer psychological research questions (e.g., to develop wellbeing profiles). Of course, we equally welcome research that uses the ESS personal and social wellbeing module data in other innovative ways.

How (un)fair is Europe? Jule Adriaans (2024 Jowell-Kaase Early Career Researcher, Bielefeld University) Social inequalities are ubiquitous in European societies. They are frequently at the center of public debate and social science research. Both in academic and non-academic discourse, the need to address social inequality is often motivated by the assumption that large inequalities harm societies by reducing their members' well-being and threatening social cohesion. However, empirical findings show that lay people are neither particularly good at assessing the extent of inequality nor do they prefer strict equality. Instead, it seems that people strive for justice - demanding equal treatment as well the consideration of individual contributions and needs - and react negatively to injustice. Against this backdrop, I will use comparative survey data - with a particular focus on ESS Round 9 data - to take stock of the state of justice and fairness in Europe, asking: How unfair is Europe? And how do Europeans respond to the unfairness they identify?