This article examines cross-country differences in the strength of individuals’ belief that their country is better than most others and the dependence of this belief on their country’s performance in various spheres. The research design consists of a series of multilevel ordinal logistic regression models estimated using the data of the most recent thematic wave of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)—National Identity module. Our research finds that these effects are mostly nonlinear U-shaped: people from both high- and low-performing countries express a strong belief in their country’s superiority, while people from average-performing countries do not. These findings suggest a bifurcated nature of belief in national superiority—an interplay between a grounded estimation of a country’s actual achievements and the social norms and individual motivations that prescribe holding one’s own country in high esteem regardless of its actual performance. These norms are found to be the strongest in underperforming countries, while in average- and high-performing countries, people making these evaluations are under weaker normative pressure and therefore more attuned to country achievements. As a result, the weakest belief in national superiority is found not in underperforming, but in average-performing countries. The latter also have the highest diversity on this belief, probably because different segments of the population compare their country’s performance against different benchmarks.

The current study is a content analysis of news comments posted on the Russian social network VKontakte to investigate the expression of opinions on material well-being. Based on NLP methods, we analyze the main groups of expression, which are considered in the context of formulating evaluations and appealing to social norms. We analyze the content of discourse at the micro-level; analyze how attitudes towards the topic of material well-being are expressed through evaluative and normative statements; and identify the key actors of the discussions. The analysis shows the prevalence of generalized statements, which consider their country and people as a whole, opposed to the outside world. The most significant problems, such as price growth, unemployment, are not actively discussed. One's own situation is usually characterized by neutral or positive assessments, while a generalized judgment about the life of the "Russian people" is predominantly assessed negatively. It is shown that on the basis of a negative assessment of the current state of affairs a person appeals to the social norm. A significant share of normative statements are prescriptions, which are less connected with references to specific individuals or organizations. Thus, the discussions do not show any tendency for Russian citizens to impute to the country's leadership the obligation to take measures to change life for the best.

Abstract The article examines a key attribute of Russian national identity—national pride—as it is reflected in mass consciousness. To trace the dynamics of multiple facets of national pride and related phenomena from 1996 to 2015, we use data from five surveys. The results demonstrate a substantial growth in Russian national pride in specific country achievements and general pride in Russian citizenship over the last 20 years. This change is the result of the population’s and state’s need for positive social identity as well as from both real and imagined progress in the Russian economy and political influence, and it started long before the Crimea mobilization and Olympics of 2014. The structural difference in pride in various achievements persisted for the 20 years examined here, but became less distinct. Across the years examined here, Russian national pride has become more strongly related to belief in the superiority of the country and is therefore increasingly competitive.

People are discontented about the fact that there are not enough opportunities to exert influence, but this does not negate the fact that such opportunities have increased many times over. As the o...

The circular structure of basic human values is the core element of the Schwartz value theory. The structure demonstrated high robustness across cultures. However, the specific correlations between values and the differences in these correlations across countries have received little attention. The current research investigated the within-country correlations between the four higher order values. We estimated the correlations with meta-analytical mixed-effects models based on 10 surveys, on different value instruments, and on data from 104 countries. Analyses revealed theoretically expected negative relations between openness to change and conservation values and between self-transcendence and self-enhancement values. More interestingly, openness to change and self-transcendence values related negatively with each other, as did conservation and self-enhancement. Openness to change and self-enhancement values related predominantly positively, as did conservation and self-transcendence values. Correlations between the adjacent values were weaker in more economically developed countries, revealing higher value complexity of these societies. These findings were consistent across multiple surveys and after controlling for levels of education and income inequality. We concluded that, across most countries, values tend to be organized predominantly in line with the Social versus Person Focus opposition, whereas the Growth versus Self-Protection opposition is pronounced only in more economically developed countries.

Research on social values of the Russian population usually is based on dominant or average values as reflected in public opinion surveys. The research reported in this article takes a different approach, looking not at averages but at how differences in values are distributed throughout the society. This shows a more complex picture, and one that is changing with each new generation.

The paper is dedicated to comparing gender and family attitudes in Russian speakers in Estonia and Latvia to ethnic majority members in their respective countries and to Russians. The obtained results demonstrate that at least gender and family related attitude in Latvia and Estonia follow the logic not of marginalization, but of polarization. Instead of developing relatively moderate views – more traditionalist than in Estonians and Latvians yet more modern than in Russians, Russian speaking minority members in the Baltics overshoot the Russian majority living in Russia by the degree of their traditionalism. These results have important practical implications demonstrating a potential obstacle in the way of integration of ethnic minorities – their opposing their own attitudes to the attitudes held by the majority even in the spheres not directly related to ethnonational issues and for this reasons are usually overlooked when discussing integration of ethnic minority members.

The purpose of the present research is to compared gendered work attitudes held by Russian speakers in Estonia and Latvia to the attitudes of ethnic majorities in these countries. The empirical research is based on the European Value Study data from the wave of 2008. The results demonstrate that ethnolinguistic identity may have, as in the Baltic case, an important effect on attitudes apparently unrelated to ethnonational issues. Yet this effect differentiating an ethnolinguistic minority from an ethic majority is counteracted with the impact of objective factors shared to a large extent by a minority and a majority within a given country and working in the opposite direction to the ethnolinguistic identity – by bringing the two groups’ attitudes closer to each other. The relative liberalism or conservatism of the expressed attitudes, as we discovered, strongly depend on priming. Ethnolinguistic identities (in the Baltic case, shifting Russian speakers’ views towards the more conservative Russia) have relatively stronger effect when dealing with subjective phenomena such as feelings and norms, while economic situation comes to the forefront for attitude towards objective, directly observable factors with direct and obvious consequences for an individual’s material well-being.

The within-country and between-country heterogeneity of populations has been largely studied apart from each other. This article analyses simultaneously these two parts of value heterogeneity of populations using a typological approach. Using data from the European Social Survey, populations of 29 European countries are classified based on their values that were measured with Schwartz's Portrait Values Questionnaire. Latent class analysis resulted in five European value classes. All the countries studied are internally diverse in their value class composition, and most of them have a non-zero probability to have members of all the five value classes. Nordic and Western European countries surpass Mediterranean and Post-Communist Europe in the probability of a class that combines the strongest preferences for Openness over Conservation and for Self-Transcendence over Self-Enhancement. It is concluded that a typological approach provides a new look at within- and between-country value differences, making empirical comparisons holistic and more parsimonious.

This chapter presents the analysis of national pride based on data from the 36 countries and regions participating in the ISSP-2003 survey. On political culture, Almond and Verba placed national pride and its sources among the key components of political culture on a par with values, political trust, and regime support. The chapter discusses the outcome of the empirical testing of our research hypotheses and elaborates on the wider implications of the findings. According to the psychological mechanism of its generation it has not received enough consideration in the literature. The populations that have markedly higher relative positions on the domain-based factor than on the direct single-variable estimate of national pride include West Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The Human Development Index (HDI) is more focused on the social outcomes of economic advancement; it combines the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita with the country life expectancy and the quality of country health care and educational system indicators.

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The paper demonstrates the advantages of typological approach in value studies. Using Schwartz value measures and the European Social Survey data the authors have found five value classes among Europeans. These classes are robust across six years and represent typical patterns of individual value preferences. The four of these five value classes lie along the Social – Personal Focus dimension combining preferences for Conservation and SelfTranscendence (Social Focus) versus preferences for Openness to change and Self-Enhancement (Personal Focus) values. The fifth class named Growth values class combines preferences for Openness to change and Self-Transcendence values which are opposed to each other in the Social Focus and Personal Focus classes. All countries have at least some share of each value class. Cross-country differences of the Growth class country shares are much bigger than differences of the other classes. Growth class country share is highly related to a country wealth as measured by GNI per capita as well. Russia has one of the largest shares of Personal Focus classes and that share grew notably since 2006. Russian members of Personal Focus classes possess different kinds of personal resources, whereas Social Focus classes are less resource-rich and this fits well with their social involvement and hierarchical social dependency. Russia has a very small share of the Growth values class and this is in line with its level of economic development.

Unlike variable-centered measures, validity and stability of typologies have been rarely studied. Magun, Rudnev and Schmidt [in review] developed a value typology of the European population using data from the 4th round of the European Social Survey. The value classes showed heuristic power in the comparison of different parts of the European population, countries in particular, enabling more differentiated interpretations in a parsimonious way. The current paper tests the stability of this typology by extending the study to three time points – consecutive surveys in 2008, 2010 and 2012. Conceptually, this test coincides with measurement invariance testing. We reviewed the levels of typology measurement invariance. Then, the invariance of the value typology of Europeans was tested across three rounds of the ESS and it was found to hold configural and partial invariance. The reliability of the value classes was supported by the stability of country class probabilities across the time points as well. The correlations of the country shares of the value classes with the economic development of countries are also invariant at the three time points. The results imply that the value classification of Europeans is not ad hoc, but reflects the natural structure of European societies, and can be used in future studies.

The basic values of the Russian population and the population of 31 European countries were compared with data obtained by the Schwartz Questionnaire, embedded into the fourth round of the European Social Survey. Conclusions about similarities and differences of basic human values between Russia and other European countries confirm the thesis that Russia is a country which shares a general logic of cultural and social development with the rest of the world and which has a lot in common with countries of a similar economic level and recent political history. In most value comparisons, Russia appeared to be closer to Post-Communist and Mediterranean countries than to Western European or Nordic countries.The fact that Russians are less committed than most Europeans to the values of caring, tolerance, equality, and ecology, and, conversely, more committed than most Europeans to the competitive “zero-sum” values of personal success, wealth, and power, confirms the validity of current moral criticisms of mass values and morals in Russia. The other disturbing fact is the relatively low commitment of Russians to the values of Openness to Change and, conversely, a strong focus on Conservation. So basic values of Russians create a cultural barrier to the development of an innovation-based economy and to the societal development as a whole. Thanks to a shift from country-level analysis to individual- and group-level analysis, we challenge the notion of the “average Russian” and demonstrate that the Russian value majority consists of two subtypes. Russia also has a sizable value minority and its members share values non-typical for most Russians. Two value minorities, which embrace 19% of the Russian population, are more committed to values of Openness and Self-Transcendence than the rest of the Russian population. These value groups are typical for European countries with more prosperous and happy populations and we can hypothesize that in Russia they are also resource groups for the country’s advancement.

Цель данной статьи – проверить справедливость вывода о значительной внутристрановой вариации ценностей для ценностных показателей, предложенных Р. Инглхартом, а также выявить зависимость ценностного состава населения от характеристик страны проживания. Чтобы получить инструмент для сравнения стран по ценностному составу их населения, авторы строят типологию, которая классифицирует всех европейских респондентов на основе их ценностных показателей.

In order to combine a study of within-country value diversity and cross-country differences, we applied a person-centered approach. Instead of focusing on the distinct value items, respondents from the 33 European countries were classified on the basis of the whole set of Schwartz value items (Portrait Values Questionnaire) by means of Latent Class Analysis. Six Pan-European value classes were found; they differ both by rank of values and degree of value preferences. Surprisingly, a class with the least pronounced value preferences appeared to be the largest one (38%). In each country all six value classes are represented. Nordic and Western European countries have more uniform distributions of value class shares than Post-Communist and Mediterranean countries; this is suggested to be an implication of societal developmental processes which start from the few people who commit themselves to the values of more advanced countries.