‘Subjective Europeanization’: do inner-European comparisons affect life satisfaction?

ABSTRACT

Research in the social sciences has shown recurrently that life satisfaction varies across countries. More recently, the question was raised whether Europeans are comparing living conditions in European countries, and whether these comparisons are affecting the way they assess their personal situation. The paper uses original survey data from nine European countries in order to answer these questions. We analyze the way European citizens assess the living conditions in the various countries under analysis. And we test whether assessments of other countries are significantly interrelated with reported levels of life satisfaction. Finally, we measure the extent to which these effects hold if other reference groups (friends, neighbors, own country) and individual socio-demographic traits are included in the analysis. Our findings paint a mixed picture. Assessing living conditions in other European countries is widely diffused and attests a marked ‘cognitive Europeanization’. However, comparisons with other countries play a less relevant role for reported life satisfaction, when compared to the assessment of the own national economy and the own household situation. Moreover, Switzerland as a non-EU-member is a more significant target than most other EU-members, attesting that we are rather speaking of a European frame of reference, than an EU-related one.

KEYWORDS:

• Europeanization
• reference groups
• relative deprivation
• life satisfaction
• perception of living standards

Acknowledgements

The authors like to thank the unknown reviewers as well as Maria Grasso and Barbara Yoxon for their valuable comments. Results presented in this article have been obtained within the project ‘Living with Hard Times: How Citizens React to Economic Crises and Their Social and Political Consequences’ (LIVEWHAT).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Christian Lahusen is professor of sociology at Siegen University in Germany. His research interests are: political sociology, contentious politics, social movements, social problems, and the sociology of Europe and European integration.

Johannes Kiess is a researcher at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Siegen. His research interests are: European sociology, industrial relations, political sociology, right-wing extremism.

Notes

1 More information on the project and the survey is available on the project website: http://www.livewhat.unige.ch/ (last checked 1 January 2017).

2 This set of questions was posed after the respondents were asked to assess their overall life satisfaction. Thus we do not expect a bias of the sort that European comparisons were made salient afore by the order of questions.

3 The complete results of these regressions have not been included for limitations of space but are available upon request.

4 The survey was conducted before migration issues took over as the most salient European topic in late summer 2015. It can be assumed that, like the Brexit-vote in the summer of 2016, issues of (inner) migration, perceived as crises, likewise affect European comparisons of living conditions.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme [grant agreement no. 613237].