EUREQUAL is the acronym for 'Social Inequality and Why it Matters for the Economic and Democratic Development of Europe and its Citizens: Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective'. (main applicant Stephen Whitefield)The fundamental aim of the proposed project is to create and disseminate knowledge that will facilitate the achievement of greater social equality between individuals, social cohesiveness in societies, democratic and market development, and the broader integration of Europe.
Funded by EU FP6
http://eurequal.politics.ox.ac.uk/
Social divisions, party strategy and political choice (together with Geoffrey Evans)This project proposes a combined over time and cross-national research design that enables the simultaneous study of contextual factors that vary through time and space and which can provide explanations of why and when social bases of whatever sort underlie political preferences. The key question therefore is how are political cleavages formed and how do they change?
Funded by EQUALSOC KP6
http://www.equalsoc.org/
Criminal reproduction: the mutual influences of criminal careers of family members Do children of recidivists have a higher chance to become an offender as well? To what extent do siblings resemble and influence each others criminal careers? This project aims to examine the influence of criminal careers of parents and siblings on the development of individual criminal careers. Next to the offending of family members of a person, we will investigate to what extent important life events of this person and his/her family-members affect his/her criminal career.
We will use a multiple data-source strategy in order to test our hypotheses. The data are quantitative and qualitative, consist of 5,000 families, cover a period of 60 years and are obtained from legal, municipal and military files.
(Together with Marieke van de Rakt (Nijmegen) and Paul Nieuwbeerta (Leiden / Utrecht)
Funded by NWO (Netherlands)
Secularization or not?In the last three decades of the twentieth century religion has been back on the societal stage. Examples can be found all over the world and apply to various religious groups. These developments attracted not only attention from social scientists. In the two decennia following after World War II the general impression was that the secularization process was irreversible in industrial societies and that developing countries would show a similar trend later. However, the above mentioned religious revival and especially the relative high levels of religious participation in the United States caused doubts on the secularization thesis. What followed was a renaissance of theorizing in the sociology of religion. This project contains various sub-projects and intends to tests various implications from the secularization theory and its rival the ‘supply-side’ theory. Interestingly, the supply side approach is sometimes not incompatible with some important hypotheses implied by the secularization paradigm.
A chapter is in preperation for the Handbook of Rational Choice Social Research (subsidized by the Russell Sage Foundation, New York)