Abstract
Over the last two decades, European countries have struggled with several crises (e.g., the Great Recession, the refugee crisis) which had a tremendous impact on (some) societies. Typically, these crises were accompanied by divisive public discourses that rely heavily on a sharp and moralistic us-them distinction. Especially extreme right- and left-wing parties have adopted such conflict discourses and have gained much electoral support. Against this background, this paper has two objectives. First, data from the European Quality of Life Survey from 2003 to 2016 in 27 countries are used to provide a comprehensive overview of the salience of perceived societal conflicts between seven pairs of groups between countries and across time. We find substantial differences between countries and longitudinal trend variation in the salience of perceived societal conflict. For example, in Eastern European countries more economic conflict is perceived, while in Western European countries people perceive more cultural conflict between different ethnic and religious groups. Second, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses reveal that specific perceptions of conflict are structured by an underlying general orientation, generalized conflict thinking: people’s tendency to perceive society through the lens of conflict regardless of the specificity of these groups. The measure for generalized conflict thinking is metric equivalent across a large sample of countries. This demonstrates that generalized conflict thinking can be used as a social indicator for comparative research. In the conclusion we elaborate on the implications of our findings and develop a research agenda regarding generalized conflict thinking.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, European countries have struggled with several crises that have had a major impact on society
Against the background of a series of societal crises and the omnipresence of conflict discourses in the public sphere in many countries, this paper examined the perception of societal conflicts among the wider public across 27 European countries
Using data from the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) we find (1) substantial cross-country and longitudinal trend variation in the salience of perceived societal conflicts and (2) that specific perceptions of conflict are structured by an underlying general orientation, that can be measured by a one-dimensional scale in every country and is metric invariant across a large sample of countries
Summary
Over the last two decades, European countries have struggled with several crises that have had a major impact on society. These crises affected European countries to varying degrees, there are almost no European countries that did not face the challenges posed by these crises These crises are accompanied by divisive and moralistic discourses centred around sharp us-them distinctions whereby ‘we’ (e.g., the people, the citizens, the poor, the men, the young, the heterosexuals etc.) are pitted against ‘them’ (e.g., the elite, the immigrants/refugees, the rich, the women, the elderly, the LGBTQ community etc.). Relying on such conflict frames is typically associated with so-called radical politics (Mudde, 2007; Ramiro & Gomez, 2017), research shows that conflict frames are amongst the most popular media frames (Bartholomé et al, 2018). When conflict discourses are applied in a wide range of contexts, pitting very different groups against each other, this raises the question whether (1) such a thing as generalized conflict thinking exists, i.e., a tendency to perceive society through the lens of conflict regardless of the specificity of these groups, that (2) can be measured and (3) used in comparative research
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