On Thursday, October 26, starting at 9:30 a.m., The Institute of Social Sciences (IDN) organized a joint session with the CSES secretariat (Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, www.cses.org), devoted to showcasing the most recent research of their emerging generation of researchers.
The session’s goal was to provide an opportunity for the researchers to learn about each other’s work, exchange ideas about substantive and methodological approaches, and for networking. In two sessions, four recent research projects and an introductory overview of the CSES project were presented. The presented studies covered various research topics in quantitative social sciences, from comparative studies of political attitudes and behavior, Montenegrin 2023 election study, to personal and work values across Europe.
By way of an introduction, Dave Howel (CSES secretariat, Institute of Social Research, University of Michigan) briefly presented the CSES project – its more than a quarter of a century-long history, as well as the plans for the future. Bojan Todosijević (IDN) complemented the introduction by reviewing the efforts invested in joining Serbia to this international project.
Katharina Blinzler (The GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences; CSES secretariat) opened the session with a study co-authored with Klara Dentler and Steve Quinlan, dealing with German Federal Elections. They explored the personalization of politics thesis, particularly the question of the unmediated impact of leaders on vote choice (behavioral personalization), using data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) and the CSES. Their results support the existence of behavioral personalization but also showed that its direct impact remains principally secondary to party popularity.
Slaven Živković (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz; DeFacto, Montenegro) presented an early analysis of the Montenegro National Election Study (MNES) conducted after the snap parliamentary elections on June 11, 2023. This presentation shed light on the results of the elections in which the newly established Europe Now! party secured victory with 25% of the total votes.
In the presentation “Work Values and Perceived Job Insecurity in Europe”, Jovana Zafirović (IDN) provided an empirical and comparative analysis of the relationship between work values and perceived job insecurity in Europe. The author attempted to integrate cultural factors at the macro level into the job insecurity model and test the hypothesis that the predominance of extrinsic work values in a country, relative to intrinsic ones, significantly contributes to perceptions of job insecurity, using the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data, covering the period between 1997 to 2015.
In the final presentation, Vladimir Mentus (IDN) presented a latent growth curve modeling approach to value priorities across Western Europe. Using the European Social Survey data, the author analyzed the significance of the time effect and country-level differences in time effects on individual value priorities. The study concluded that the evidence suggests a relative stability of values and a slow cultural shift in Western Europe.
The presentations were followed by open discussion, where the presenters and the audience actively participated. The overall impression of the meeting was that the new generation of scholars from different parts of the world and of different academic backgrounds share many commonalities in their research work – such as state-of-the-art methodology, theoretical sophistication, and interest in a comparative approach.
