Abstract
This journal publishes themed issues with some regularity – and, in most cases, those are the result of an arrangement with guest editors who approach the Editor with an idea for a collection of papers on a special topic. Currently, there are multiple themed issues ‘in the works’ on migration, as well as a large collection of curated papers on nationalism and national identity working their way through our rigorous review process: expect to see upcoming special issues on those topics (with one on attitudes toward immigrants in Europe likely to appear in one of the next two issues).
The current number of the journal does not have any ‘guest editor’; instead, it came together rather serendipitously. But the first three articles that appear below are all focused on potentially troubling trends in European societies. So I have designated them as a ‘special section’ of IJCS. In this note, I will not attempt to fully describe these papers, but I would like to briefly note how they are thematically connected.
Irem Ebeturk and Oliver Cowart are sociology doctoral students at Emory University. They did an analysis of recent policy debates leading to the criminalization of forced (non-consensual) marriages in legislatures across the continent in the last decade or so. The authors draw on a plethora of data sources, analyze it via a deft use of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), and arrive at interesting conceptual conclusions that bear on a debate between neo-realists and reo-institutionalists: so the article is empirically rich, methodologically innovative, and theoretically interesting – all nice contributions to comparative sociology, broadly. But their topic is framed in terms of the wider discourse on immigration, national identity, and women’s rights. While one might expect that feminist forces (and concerns about universal human rights) might be driving the changes in marriage laws across Europe, the authors conclude that, in fact, conservative, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant ideologies may be a more crucial impetus. So the movement against forced marriage becomes a ‘punitive’ path that may actually harm rather than help minority and immigrant women, raising a specter of ‘a reactionary politics of belonging’ in Europe.
The next two articles share even more in common, as they probe first, whether Europe is a continent of pessimism or realism (Steenvorden and van der Meer), and then the relationship between class inequality and status anxiety in various European societies (Jan Delhey, Christian Schneickert, and Leonie Steckermeier). These two studies are both based on cross-national survey research and multilevel regression analysis (examining both individual correlates and national contexts). Once again, there are multiple contributions to our knowledge of comparative sociology in these studies. Steenverden and van der Meer find that changing economic conditions are more likely to impact longitudinal within country variations on social pessimism but not broad cross-national differences (they link this to recent findings in studies of ‘political trust’). Delhey et al. develop Bourdieuian theoretical approach that emphasizes the key role of cultural consumption and cultural class distinctions in explaining status anxiety – so their research provides something of a ‘redirection’ of the argument offered in the famous 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. But this paper on sociocultural inequalities warns that ‘increasing commodification of goods, services, and opportunities’ in conjunction with forms of economic inequality are likely to drive ‘“unhealthy” collective styles that heighten status anxiety’ in European society. Steenvorden and van der Meer note how societal pessimism is frequently the political currency of right wing populism and offer a dire warning: ‘there is a risk that enduring societal pessimism – itself caused by political instability and/or economic recession – induces further stagnation and pessimism’ (though, to their credit, these authors do conclude, optimistically, that political changes can alter this and leaders ‘do not have to sit back and watch societal pessimism take its course’).
Finally, just a word about the final article in this issue, on the differential political participation of homeowners versus renters by Stéfanie André, Caroline Wilde, and Ruud Luijkx. The lead author here is also a doctoral student (at Tilburg University) and this is another fine quantitative comparative analysis, drawing on mainly European survey data (with the United States adds as the one non-continent case); the paper deploys an innovative methodological procedure, coarsened exact matching (CEM) to better control of endogeniety. It’s a good paper, it is mostly about Europe, but it doesn’t ‘fit’ well enough into the rubric of ‘Troubled Europe’, so it’s not included in that themed section. Read it anyway!