International Journal of Comparative Sociology

This article examines the causes of criminalization of forced marriage in European countries. The first part of the article locates the debate on forced marriage within the wider discourse of immigration, national identity, and women’s rights. The second part uses qualitative comparative analysis to analyze 29 European nations, 20 of which criminalized forced marriage. Our findings indicate that criminalization of forced marriage emerges out of a complex set of conditions and the causal recipes differ for early (before 2013) and late adopters (after 2013) of the policy of criminalization. For nations in which criminalization policy was adopted before 2013, the intermingling of world cultural, feminist, and right-wing policies is the main causal mechanism. For the late adopters, a similar causal path fails to emerge indicating that criminalization became normative in European policy environment. In other words, late adopters simply mimic others.

The often-posed claim that Europe is a pessimistic continent is not unjustified. In 2012, 53 percent of European Union (EU) citizens were pessimistic about their country. Surprisingly, however, societal pessimism has received very little scientific attention. In this article, we examine to what extent political and economic factors drive societal pessimism. In terms of political factors, we expect that supranationalization, political instability, and corruption increase societal pessimism, as they diminish national political power and can inspire collective powerlessness. Economically, we expect that the retrenchment of welfare state provisions and economic decline drive societal pessimism, as these developments contribute to socioeconomic vulnerability. We assess the impact of these political and economic factors on the level of societal pessimism in the EU, both cross-nationally and over time, through multilevel analyses of Eurobarometer data (13 waves between 2006 and 2012 in 23 EU countries). Our findings show that the political factors (changes in government, corruption) primarily explain cross-national differences in societal pessimism, while the macro-economic context (economic growth, unemployment) primarily explains longitudinal trends within countries. These findings demonstrate that, to a large extent, societal pessimism cannot be viewed separately from its political and economic context.

The Spirit Level Theory developed by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett claims that low-inequality societies are better societies because people are plagued less by status anxiety, and previous research has largely supported this idea. With the aim of broadening the knowledge about status anxiety, this article examines a crucial component of status anxiety – the feeling of not counting much in the eyes of others – within a multilevel framework for 27 European countries, using the European Quality of Life Survey 2011/2012. We first clarify which individual characteristics in particular result in status anxiety: labor market exclusion and low-income position. Second, influenced by the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction, we explore a societal condition of status anxiety that appears to be particularly salient due to its visibility in everyday life: cultural class divisions. Our evidence suggests that the extent of class divisions in cultural consumption fuels status anxiety, over and above the effects of income inequality and national affluence. Thus, we advocate a sociocultural redirection of the Spirit Level framework.

Integrating housing tenure in Instrumental Motivation Theory predicts a tenure gap in electoral participation, as homeowners would be more motivated to vote compared with tenants. The empirical question is whether this effect is causal or rather due to selection into different housing tenures. This question is tackled using coarsened exact matching (CEM) on data for 19 countries, allowing us to better control for endogeneity. Even then, homeowners are found to vote more often than tenants. This association is stronger in countries characterized by a strong pro-homeownership ideology and/or where the financialization of housing markets turned houses into assets.