Annette Schnabel

WHAT MAKES COLLECTIVE GOODS A SHARED CONCERN? RE-CONSTRUCTING THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE COLLECTIVENESS OF GOODS

When dealing with collective phenomena, rational choice theories (RCT) focus mainly on the collective good problem. However, the question of how a collective good becomes a shared concern has not been considered up to now. This article demonstrates theoretical possibilities to answer this question within the frame of reference of RCT. It is argued that issues become shared ones if actors adapt socially shared situational definitions and valuations (e.g. ideologies). This can be understood as a rational choice between several options that provide individual benefits. Such an adaptation occurs only under particular circumstances that can be derived from RCT. At the same time, rational actors influence and shape situational definitions and valuations during the process of adapting them.

INTEGRATION – WHAT INTEGRATION?

ABSTRACT Since the founding of the European Union, religion has become an increasingly important aspect in shaping European identity and thereby social cohesion in Europe. Social cohesion depends to a high degree on a successfully established distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Religion became one important marker of such boundaries. However, religion works both as an individual-level and an EU-level property. In order to take religion into consideration on the level of individual religiousness and as an institutionalised framework, we combine an analysis of key documents of the European Commission with a quantitative analysis of individual attitudes towards Europe. This combination of methods enables us to track the ‘discovery of religion’ by the European Commission as a means for social cohesion and the potential of religion to create Europeanness among the EU-citizens. We focus on the crucial period between 1990 and 2000 in which the major system transformation from EEC to EU took place. The quantitative analysis is conducted as a multi-level analysis on the basis of the European Value Survey 1990 and 2000. The data reveal that in fact over a 10-year period, the European integration project has begun to evolve towards an identity project with religion as a key factor on both levels.

Emotions Matter after All: How Reproductive Rights Advocates Orchestrate Emotions to Influence Policies in Peru:

Emotions clearly matter in social movements, but it is less apparent how social movement participants actively handle emotions in their line of activities. In this article, the authors address this question by examining how two reproductive rights coalitions in Peru employ and manage emotions in relation to different actors who they must deal with to influence policies. Empirical materials consist of participant observation, focus groups, and individual interviews conducted with the coalitions and their members. Grounded theory was used to analyze the data. The authors distinguish relationships with five relevant actors: The internal members of the coalitions, allies, the general public, the Catholic Church as the major opponent, and government officials as the main target. As each relationship requires distinct emotion work, coalition members simultaneously adjust to contradictory emotional expectations while actively evoking and coordinating emotions. The authors refer to this as the orcherstration of emotion work.

Religion in European constitutions – cases of different secularities

ABSTRACT This article explores how religion and the public legal domains of modern societies in the EU-member states are institutionally interconnected. We focus our analysis on how religion, religiosity and religious organisations are integrated and regulated in European constitutions. Our analysis is guided by two sociological theories concerning the development of modern institutional arrangements: (a) neo-institutionalism, emphasising the influence of world culture which leads to institutional isomorphism as the adaption of worldwide shared scripts; (b) path dependency, emphasising the emergence of institutional arrangements as path depending on particular power relations and historical events. From neo-institutionalism, we expect to find similarities in more recent constitutions while theories of path dependency indicate similarities only in cases of similar historical events or power relations. In applying an explorative, quantitative document analysis of a unique data set of constitutions, we detect similarities and differences concerning religion in the constitutional texts. Our analysis establishes religion as a multi-dimensional issue that is regulated in quite different ways in different states. We demonstrate that neo-institutionalism is valid only on the mere formal level of the composition of the constitutions of the EU-member states.

How the Religious Cleavages of Civil Society Shape National Identity

This article focuses on religion and the embeddedness in civil society. We examine the relationship between religion and national identity (ethnic and civic). Our findings show that individual religiosity continues to play an important role in sustaining both forms of national identity. In addition to other studies, we examine the relationship between religion as a societal phenomenon and individual national identity and find the following: The stronger the relationship between state and religion, the stronger the ethnic identity; the more the religious homogeneity, the stronger the ethnic identity; and there is no relationship between aggregated degree of religious organizations and identity. We conclude that religion continues to play a major role in the making of civil society, but the specific circumstances vary according to the religious representation. In other words, religion can both make and unmake national identity.

In God we trust – the role of religion for cohesion and integration in current European societies

The aim of the paper is to investigate the role of religion for social cohesion and integration in European societies. For the purpose of this article, we assume that religion matters not only in the form of different aspects of individual religiousness, but also as a constituent of the social and legal framework. Social cohesion is understood as the aggregated result of individual vertical and horizontal trust. We use data from the International Social Survey Programme in order to test a comparative multilevel model for the societies of the European Union as to whether trust in others and in political institutions both depend on individual religiousness and the religious framework of society. Without denying the potential exclusive effect of religion, the data show that religion still is important on different societal levels: counter to prevalent findings, a-religiousness and Protestantism on the individual level do not reduce feelings of integration, while independent of the denomination, active commun...

Wo kämen wir hin, wenn wir Ideologien reduzierten? Ideologien in methodologisch-individualistischer Perspektive

Ideologien sind in der Soziologie ein problematischer Begriff.1 Gleichzeitig stellen sie einen besonders interessanten Testfall fur das Forschungsprogramm des methodologischen Individualismus dar. Das Makro-Mikro-Makro-Modell sozialwissenschaftlicher Erklarungen erfasst Ideologien zunachst als prototypisches ‚Makro‘. Sie gelten als sozial geteilte kognitive Inhalte, die Wirkungen auf die Entscheidungen von Akteuren entfalten und sich gleichzeitig als Produkt menschlichen Handelns erklaren lassen konnen. So wenig fraglich dieses Verstandnis aus reduktionistischer Perspektive ist, so wenig Einigkeit besteht daruber, wie genau Ideologien innerhalb des Forschungsprogramms des Methodologischen Individualismus zu erfassen seien: Sollten sie als externe Bedingungen individueller Entscheidungen aufgefasst werden oder allein in ihrer Realisierung durch Akteure? Diese Frage knupft an die konzeptionelle Unterscheidung zwischen strukturell-individualistischen und eliminativen Positionen an. Der folgende Beitrag setzt sich mit den Potentialen und Konsequenzen dieser beiden Lesarten fur die soziologische Konzeption von Ideologien auseinander und will damit zu einem tieferen Verstandnis von Institutionen2 und Sozialitat in einer am methodologischen Individualismus orientierten Soziologie beitragen.

Das Makro-Mikro-Makro-Modell der soziologischen Erklärung - zur Einleitung

Seit Coleman (2001) und Esser (1993) ihm in der deutschen Soziologie zu einer gewissen Prominenz verhalfen, erfreut sich das Makro-Mikro-Makro-Modell der soziologischen Erklarung, kurz: die ‚Badewanne‘, einer zunehmenden Beliebtheit. Dies allein ware bereits Grund, sich mit diesem Modell naher zu befassen. Uber seine unubersehbare Verbreitung hinaus wachst dem Makro-Mikro-Makro-Modell jedoch allmahlich der Status einer eigenstandigen Sozialtheorie zu, der zunachst so nicht intendiert war. Daraus ergibt sich nicht nur ein Anlass, sondern sogar die Notwendigkeit, das Modell kritisch zu hinterfragen und seine tatsachlichen Potentiale als Heuristik und als Sozialtheorie zu beleuchten (zu letzterem grundlegend bereits Greshoff/Schimank 2006).

Religion and Value Orientations in Europe

Sociological literature on Europe often claims a close relationship between religion and values on the one hand and shared values and social cohesion on the other: This article empirically tests the first half of this equation. On the basis of the European Social Survey 2004 comprising of the Schwartz’ Human Value Scale, we analyse if value orientations of religious people differ from those preferred by non-religious people and if such patterns are stable across Europe. We find that religious people in Europe differ from non-religious people in being more conservative and perceiving rules and customs as very important in their lives. We use different indicators for individual religiousness in order to test their different impacts on individual value formation. Despite popular expectations, we were able to establish that value orientations are less influenced by theological knowledge than practicing religion.

Religion und soziale Integration – Europa als Anwendungsfall einer Mehrebenen-Analyse

In der Wohlfahrtsstaatstheorie ist die These prominent, dass soziale Kohasion (kulturelle) Homogenitat benotige. Im vorliegenden Beitrag gehen wir empirisch der Frage nach, inwiefern Religion in modernen europaischen Gesellschaften soziale Kohasion zu unterstutzen oder zu behindern vermag. Religion wird im Rahmen dieses Beitrags als mehr-dimensionales Konzept aufgefasst, das sowohl individuelle Religiositat als auch religiose Heterogenitat von Gesellschaften und das Verhaltnis von Staat und Kirchen umfasst. Fur die empirische Analyse wird ein Mehrebenen-Modell auf der Basis von Daten des International Social Survey Programme (ISSP 2008) zur Anwendung gebracht. Dabei konnte gezeigt werden, dass in Europa Religion tatsachlich nicht nur in Form individueller Religiositat, sondern insbesondere als Kontext-Variable generelles Vertrauen und damit gesellschaftliche Kohasion beeinflusst.