Comparative Perspectives on Social Values and Modernization,Fourth Day, April 27, 2011
The Laboratory for Comparative Social Studies hosted the international workshop «Comparative Perspectives on Social Values and Modernization» in Saint Petersburg on April 24-27 2011.
Daria Oreshina
Topic: "Value Profile of Orthodox Christian. Comparative Perspective"
After reviewing the literature, Daria took 3 groups of countries for analysis: Western Christian countries, Orthodox Christian countries and Muslim countries. She assumes that one can’t take religious values in the countries as a homogeneous criterion. All the believers can be split into strict and non-strict. The researcher wants to figure out the difference in values of these two groups with the help of correspondence analysis. Some steps have been already made, for example, Daria found out that difference in values of Christians and Muslims is based on gender attitudes and life orientations (the importance of corresponding with relatives/friends expectations).
Elena Prutskova
Topic: "Religiosity Influence on Attitudes Towards Abortion"
Originally Elena planned to figure out how religiosity influences on person’s attitudes, but later she decided to specialize her study and to focus on attitudes towards abortions. She distinguishes several components of religiosity concept. For example, she speaks about the importance of religion in one’s life and religious socialization (Elena divides it into primary and secondary). At the moment Elena conducts multilateral analysis of religiosity which includes everyday practices (praying, church-going) as well as belief itself (belief in God and in life after death).
Margarita Zavadskaya
Topic: "When Do Elections Support Autocracy? The Incumbent Strategies, Political Competition and Authoritarian Regime Survival " (New Project!)
In the framework of this project Margarita focuses on the situations when elections are used as a supporting instrument of authoritarianism. She is also interested in cases when it becomes a mechanism of changes in authoritarian society. She covers not only structural and macroeconomic factors in her research, but corrupt practices of the president and elites. Margarita takes the level of liberalization of elections as independent variable. Dependent variables are victory/defeat of incumbent president or his official successor, gap between the winner and the closest pursuer and duration of authoritarian regime.
Alexei Zakharov
Nowadays political parties discuss economics much less than they used to 40 years ago. Spokespeople concentrate on civil rights, environment control and security. Alexei assumes that at the moment division to left and right political forces is more typical for elderly voters. Younger people prefer “power vs. freedom” dimension. To check these hypotheses one should operationalize ideological positions of the voters and of the political parties. It was made and analyzed by regression modeling.
Alexander Kustov
Topic: "The Dynamics of Cosmopolitanism in the World" (New Project!)
Alexander tends to evaluate number, distribution and chronological changes of cosmopolitanism in the world. He is developing a verified statistical model that could forecast identity. For counting the number of cosmopolites in the world the researcher uses WVS question about geographical attachment. He also computes the dynamics of this factor in all the waves of WVS. The author uses logistic regression for constructing multilevel empirical model.
Marharyta Fabrykant
Topic: "Patterns of Nationalism in Post-Soviet States"
Margarita extracts 4 components of nationalism with the help of factor analysis. These are exterior ethnicity (based upon the theory of external\internal locus control), multiculturalism (includes variables that show ethnic diversity in general and certain aspects of migration policy), national duty and internal ethnicity. Basing upon mean values of each factor in every country, Margarita conducted hierarchical cluster analysis. As a result she divided 5 groups of countries with different types of nationalism.