This paper examines the consequences of China’s dramatic socioeconomic and political transformations for individual subjective well-being (SWB) from 1990 to 2007. Although many still consider China to be a collectivist country, and some scholars have argued that collectivist factors would be important predictors of individual well-being in such a context, our analysis demonstrates that the Chinese are increasingly prioritizing individualist factors in assessments of their own happiness and life satisfaction thus substantiating descriptions of their society as increasingly individualistic. While the vast majority of quality of life studies have focused on Westerners, this study contributes findings from the unique cultural context of China. Moreover, concentration on this particular period in Chinese history offers insight into the relationship between SWB and rapid socioeconomic and political change.
While there is a large literature on attitudes toward immigrants, scholars have not systematically examined the determinants of attitudes toward refugees. Often, refugees are simply treated as a subset of immigrants, under the assumption that attitudes toward both sets of foreigners are similar. In this article, we examine whether there are distinctions between attitudes toward refugees and immigrants, as well as variation in their determinants. We address these questions using individual-level data from 16 countries in the 2002 and 2014 waves of the European Social Survey. We demonstrate that these two groups of foreigners are, indeed, viewed as distinct and that differences emerge because attitudes toward refugees are more often related to macro-level factors while immigrants are more frequently associated with micro-level economic concerns. By distinguishing between refugees and immigrants, this article addresses an important gap in the academic literature on attitudes toward foreigners in Europe.
Objective This article explores how income inequality and social mobility affect attitudes about redistribution in global perspective. Methods Individual‐level data on over 50,000 individuals from 38 countries in the International Social Survey Programme are combined with country‐level data from the World Bank, Standardized Income Inequality Database, and the Economic Freedom of the World data. OLS regression models with robust, clustered standard errors are estimated to account for the presence of unobserved, country‐level effects in the error terms. Results Social mobility is found to be a more important predictor of preferences for redistribution than income inequality. Specifically, those who live in countries with greater social mobility are more supportive of redistribution while individuals who have experienced upward mobility themselves are less supportive, although an upwardly mobile individual in a more mobile society is more supportive of redistribution than an upwardly mobile individual in a less mobile society. Conclusions The central finding of this study is that the tangibility of redistributive social policies may bolster support for social spending. The structures and institutions that facilitate upward mobility—and potentially attenuate some of the detrimental effects of income inequality—are generally the products of more comprehensive redistribution policies, and public opinion may reflect this.
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