Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: (a) Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; (b) convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and (c) we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality.

http://www.matchism.org/refs/Graham_2011_MappingTheMoralDomain.pdf

Mapping the Moral Domain

Three worlds of welfare capitalism or more? A state-of-the-art report

This paper surveys the debate regarding Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare states and reviews the modified or alternative typologies ensuing from this debate. We confine ourselves to the classif...

Three worlds of welfare capitalism or more? A state-of-the-art report:

In this article, we investigate whether and, if so, to what extent, people’s notions of solidarity and their choices of justice principles are related to the type of welfare state regime they live under, as well as to individual socio-demographic and ideological factors. We analyse data from the International Social Survey Program 1996 and the European Values Study 1999, which together cover preferences of citizens from 20 welfare states. Hypotheses pertaining to people’s notions of solidarity and preferences for justice principles in the different welfare state regimes are derived from the work of Esping-Andersen and his critics, as well as from sociological and socialpsychological theories of solidarity and distributive justice. We find important, although not decisive, evidence for the thesis that the actual state of affairs with respect to the welfare state regime under which citizens live determines their views about which level of solidarity should be achieved and which justice principles should be emphasized. However, differences found are often not very pronounced, and we argue that this is a consequence of the fact that values of solidarity and justice are matters of priority to all welfare states. Taking into account the differences which exist between welfare state regimes, we also find important differences between individuals and social groups in their preferred level of solidarity and in their choice of justice principles.

/pdf/welfare-states-solidarity-and-justice-principles-does-the-2gh4nm2d9s.pdf

Welfare States, Solidarity and Justice Principles: Does the Type Really Matter?

This article sorts the various aspects of social capital (networks, trust, civism) theoretically and constructs an instrument for measuring its multifaceted ness. The instrument is validated using data from the 1999/2000 wave of the European Values Study survey. Using the same data, the article describes how social capital, by its various aspects, is distributed geographically among European countries and regions (North, West, South, East), and socially among social categories of European citizens. As far as the geographical distribution of social capital is concerned, there are some particular differences, but, on the whole, European countries and regions, with the possible exception of Northern Europe, appear not to be substantially different in aggregate levels of social capital. In Scan dinavia, social capital levels tend to be slightly higher, with the exception of family bonding. Some remarkable European patterns are found in regard to the social distribution of social capital. There is evidence of accumulation of human, economic and social capital; social capital is strongly gendered and is related to religious beliefs and behaviour, and to a political left-right stance.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20459923.pdf

Social Capital in Europe Measurement and Social and Regional Distribution of a Multifaceted Phenomenon

The differences in public support for environmental protection among individuals from 50 nations were investigated. Support was determined by the willingness of individuals to make financial sacrif...

John Gelissen

Papers

Three worlds of welfare capitalism or more? A state-of-the-art report

Three worlds of welfare capitalism or more? A state-of-the-art report:

Welfare States, Solidarity and Justice Principles: Does the Type Really Matter?

Social Capital in Europe Measurement and Social and Regional Distribution of a Multifaceted Phenomenon

Explaining popular support for environmental protection