Alienation and Group-Focused Enmity in European Context

• In Event: 568 - Section on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Groups, Trust, and Political Views

Abstract

In this paper, we address the concept of alienation in terms of Seeman (1959) using the data of the project “Group-Focused Enmity” carried out in 2008 in seven European countries. Three theoretical constructs were operationalized: powerlessness, meaninglessness, and social isolation. Recent findings (Lytkina, Welzel, 2014) show that in such post-Soviet countries as Russia and Kazakhstan meaninglessness, social isolation and job dissatisfaction form a measurement of alienation, whereas powerlessness and normlessness form a factor of “anomie.” Still, powerlessness is commonly used as an indicator of alienation (Seeman 1982, Olsen 1965, Dean 1961) whereas meaninglessness is sometimes used as an indicator of individual anomie, or anomia (Seeman 1982, Legge 2008). We assume that alienation is a universal instrument to explain attitudes in the European societies. We expect to be able to predict group-focused enmity (Heitmeyer 2000, Zick et al. 2011) with belongingness to the groups we get from the latent class analysis “alienated” and “integrated” across the countries under consideration. The syndrome of group-focused enmity encloses prejudices towards immigrants, Muslims, Jews, as well as racism, sexism and homophobia. We show that alienated individuals are more likely to have the group-focused syndrome in general and ant Muslim and sexist attitudes in particular.

Author

• Ekaterina Lytkina, National Research University-Higher School of Economics