Nan Dirk de Graaf

National Context, Religiosity, and Volunteering: Results from 53 Countries:

To what extent does the national religious context affect volunteering? Does a religious environment affect the relation between religiosity and volunteering? To answer these questions, this study specifies individual level, contextual level, and cross-level interaction hypotheses. The authors test the hypotheses by simultaneously studying the impact of religiosity of individuals, the national religious context, and their interplay on volunteering while controlling for possible confounding factors both at individual and contextual levels. Based on multilevel analyses on data from 53 countries, frequent churchgoers are more active in volunteer work and a devout national context has an additional positive effect. However, the difference between secular and religious people is substantially smaller in devout countries than in secular countries. Church attendance is hardly relevant for volunteering in devout countries. Furthermore, religious volunteering has a strong spillover effect, implying that religious citizens also volunteer more for secular organizations. This spillover effect is stronger for Catholics than for Protestants, non-Christians and nonreligious individuals.

Why are the Young more Postmaterialist? A Cross-National Analysis of Individual and Contextual Influences on Postmaterial Values

Research on aggregate generational changes in postmaterialist values indicates that cohort and life cycle effects are present, but does not identify precisely the causes of observed age differences. Using data from the 8-nation Political Action Study and macro-level indicators, this article examines the impact of both individual level and contextual factors on the relationship between year of birth and postmaterialism. Value change is found to be in the main accounted for by levels of education and severity of war-time experience—variables which have not usually been given a central role in Ingleharts theory, whereas the effects of several measures of formative affluence—a key element of the theory—are not significant. These results are taken to suggest that the postmaterialism scale does not measure post-“materialism,” but indexes instead values pertaining to progressive liberalism. It follows that the political consequences of value change are likely to differ somewhat from those proposed by the theory.

Models for status inconsistency and mobility: A comparison of the approaches by Hope and Sobel with the mainstream square additive model

This paper is about the analysis of effects of status inconsistency and mobility on a dependent variable. We compare the mainstream square additive baseline model to alternative designs by Hope (1971, 1975) and Sobel (1981, 1985). Both writers claim that the square additive baseline model also contains some status inconsistency effects. An examination of the relationships between the square additive model, Hopes halfway/difference model, and Sobels simple diagonal reference model shows that the effects uncovered by Sobel and Hope pertain to the inequality of the effects of the status variables on the dependent variable. These salience difference effects are therefore distinct from the non-additive status inconsistency effects which would be detected using the square additive approach. Less restricted versions of the diagonal reference model, the DM-1 and DM-2 models as well as a recent model by Weakliem (1992), are also examined with regard to additive/non-additive components and symmetry of effects.

Declining cleavages and political choices: the interplay of social and political factors in the Netherlands

Many social scientists believe that in the Netherlands there has been a decline in the political impact of traditional class and religious divisions over the last quarter-century. In understanding the evolving political impact of social divisions it is important to recognise that political behaviour results from the interplay between social and political forces. In this paper we test empirically the interplay between the available political options and the social situation of voters. For this purpose we use Dutch election surveys from 1971 to 1998. Comparing changes in the importance of the two traditional divisions, we find a decline in the importance of social class that does not depend on political changes. On the other hand, the decline in religious-based voting seems to be affected by the merging of the three main denominational political parties into the Christian Democrats (CDA) as well as by a linear decline of the party loyalty of Catholics.

Political choice matters : explaining the strength of class and religious cleavages in cross-national perspective

PART I: MODELS, MEASUREMENT AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS 1. Explaining Cleavage Strength: The Role of Party Positions 2. Measuring Party Positions 3. Examining The Impact of Party Positions and Class Voting in 15 Western Democracies: A Pooled Analysis PART II: THE CASE STUDIES Anglo-Saxon Democracies 4. Ideological Convergence and the Decline of Class Voting in Britain 5. The United States: Still the Politics of Diversity 6. The Declining Impact of Class on the Vote in Australia: Testing Competing Explanations 7. The Class-Party Relationship in Canada, 1965- 2004 Mainland Europe 8. Enduring Divisions and New Dimensions: Class Voting in Denmark 9. The Political Evolution of Class and Religion: An Interpretation for the Netherlands 1971-2006 10. Political Change and Cleavage Voting in France: Class, Religion, Political Appeals, and Voter Alignments (1962-2007) 11. Social Divisions and Political Choices in Germany, East and West, 1980-2006 12. Class and Religious Voting in Italy: The Rise of PolicyResponsiveness Recent Democracies 13. Do Social Divisions Explain Political Choices? The Case of Poland 14. Social Class, Religiosity, and Vote Choice in Spain, 1979-2008 PART III: CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS 15. The Importance of Political Choice and Other Lessons Learned Bibliography Index

Electoral participation in the Netherlands: Individual and contextual influences

Research into electoral participation has produced two traditions, one focusing mainly on individual level explanations while the second concentrates primarily on aggregate level explanations. By bringing these two research approaches together, we are not only able to explain individual electoral participation more thoroughly, but we also gain additional insight into the influence of aggregate level characteristics on individual behavior. We combine eight National Election Studies held in the Netherlands between 1971 and 1994 enabling us to study variation on the individual and the contextual (aggregate) level, including interactions between these two levels. Findings show that the addition of contextual characteristics form a significant improvement to an individual level model predicting electoral participation. Findings also confirm our expectation that the influence of individual characteristics such as education or political interest is dependent upon contextual characteristics describing for instance the salience of the election.

Does intergenerational social mobility affect antagonistic attitudes towards ethnic minorities

Up till now, no study satisfactorily addressed the effect of social mobility on antagonistic attitudes toward ethnic minorities. In this contribution, we investigate the effect of educational and class intergenerational mobility on ethnic stereotypes, ethnic threat, and opposition to ethnic intermarriage by using diagonal mobility models. We test several hypotheses derived from ethnic competition theory and socialization theory with data from the Social and Cultural Developments in The Netherlands surveys (SOCON, waves 1995, 2000, and 2005) and The Netherlands Kinship and Panel Study (NKPS, wave 2002). We find that the relative influence of social origin and social destination depends on the specific origin and destination combination. If one moves to a more tolerant social destination position, the influence of the social origin position is negligible. If on the other hand, one is socially mobile to a less tolerant social position, the impact of the origin on antagonistic attitudes is substantial and may even exceed the impact of the destination category. This confirms our hypothesis that adaptation to more tolerant norms is easier than adaptation to less tolerant norms. We find only meagre evidence for the hypothesis that downward mobility leads to frustration and consequently to more antagonistic attitudes.

Individual preferences, social mobility and electoral outcomes

This paper models data for the Netherlands in the 1970s on prestige of males occupation, occupational prestige of the father and ‘left/right’ score of the political party he prefers. One set of hypotheses holds that individuals behave according to economic self-interest, another set postulates a status motive. The former specify additive effects, the latter interaction effects. It is argued that these hypotheses have to be tested with Diagonal Mobility Models. A result of their application is that an economic diagonal model fits best. This paper also discusses macroimplications of these models for individual data. To determine macroeffects of status models, it is necessary to ascertain the total percentage of mobile persons in a society. For the macro-application of economic models, the amount of mobility necessitated by a countrys opportunity structure is relevant. The latter is much smaller than the former. As an economic model was corroborated, macroeffects of social mobility on a societys political outcome are smaller than might have been suspected.

National Religious Context and Volunteering: More Rigorous Tests Supporting the Association

When testing hypotheses, it is important to carefully scrutinize the data for the possibility of influential cases, especially in analyses with relatively low numbers of cases, as in most cross-national multilevel studies. We therefore welcome the methodological contribution of Van der Meer, Te Grotenhuis, and Pelzer (2010) on influential cases in multilevel models. To illustrate the usefulness of their graphic and numeric tools, they use our article ‘‘National Context, Religiosity, and Volunteering: Results from 53 Countries’’ (Ruiter and De Graaf 2006) as an illustrative case. In our original study, we checked whether our results suffered from influential cases by re-estimating our models 96 times, excluding a single case (i.e., a countrywave combination) each time. This did not lead to substantially different conclusions; consequently, we presented our results based on the full sample. Van der Meer and colleagues claim that we should have excluded not just a single case, or even two cases, but instead a cluster of cases. For this purpose, Van der Meer and colleagues develop a very useful tool that we recommend for all scholars working with multilevel models. We have several comments on Van der Meer and colleagues’ argument, which mainly focuses on a cluster of influential cases that boost the original positive association between the national religious context and volunteering. Our reply is threefold. First, we argue that based on standard rules, one could also choose to delete influential cases that dampen the original association. Second, and more importantly, after a more rigorous and less arbitrary method for dropping cases—by simultaneously deleting all influential cases on the country-wave level and not just the three Van der Meer and colleagues focus on—we are able to confirm our earlier conclusion about the positive association between religious context and volunteering. Third, we are aware of the importance of replications and stated so in our original article: ‘‘since the number of countries participating in the World Values Surveys increases with every wave, we hope that future research can provide stronger tests for non-Christian countries as well’’ (Ruiter and De Graaf 2006:207–208). The methodology in this response provides this stronger test and gives us even more confidence that our original hypothesis is supported.

The when and whom of First Marriage in The Netherlands

Sociologists are interested in societies, the shape they have and the changes in their profile. For instance, societies consist of privileged and disadvantaged classes. This stratification is indicated by the extent to which at one point in time resources like income are distributed unequally among the members of a society. This phenomenon has been studied extensively and intensively by economists and sociologists. Independent of income disparities, benefits and handicaps may be transmitted to a smaller or larger extent from parents to their children. This is the question of intergenerational social mobility or reproduction of inequalities. That question has been studied primarily by sociologists.