Tim Reeskens, Inge Sieben and Ruud Luijkx received prestigious awards and grants, all related to European Values Study

Tim Reeskens was awarded a Jean Monnet Chair in Identities and Cohesion in a Changing European Union. The aim of this Chair is to integrate the most recent (2017) wave of the European Values Study (EVS) in core teaching activities, research outcomes, and interaction with policy practitioners and civil society agents, contributing to the teaching philosophy and more broader the mission of Tilburg University, namely ‘Understanding Society’.

Inge Sieben was awarded a KA2 Erasmus+ grant of more than €400k for the project ‘European Values in Education‘. Together with partners from Fontys University of Applied Sciences (the Netherlands), KU Leuven (Belgium), EUROGEO (Belgium), Matei Bel University in Banska Bystrica (Slovakia) en Ege Universitesi Izmir (Turkey), she will develop new teaching materials for secondary schools in Europe based on data from the European Values Study. The website www.atlasofeuropeanvalues.eu will be updated with data from the latest wave, interactive charts and maps, and teaching materials.

Ruud Luijkx was successful as a partner in the awarded €4.9m Horizon 2020 grant under the ‘Infradev’ call ESS-SUSTAIN-2. Together with the European Social Survey and other data infrastructures, the European Values Study works to help ensure the long-term sustainability of these infrastructures, to reduce costs, improve methodology and increase the analytical power of the data collected.

Today it is Facebook’s 15th birthday. The social networking site, founded by Mark Zuckerberg as an online photo book for his classmates at Harvard University, has experienced a sharp growth, but was confronted with severe challenges last year (e.g. Cambridge Analytica scandal). To what extent did the controversy surrounding data leaks damage trust in social media? Sociologists Angelica Maineri (EVS central team) and Tim Reeskens (National Program director of EVS in the Netherlands), from Tilburg University (NL), published a piece on this issue in the Dutch blog Sociale Vraagstukken. The study combines data collected before the controversy on data breach started in the framework of the European Values Study 2017 in the Netherlands, with a survey proposed to the same respondents after the debate burst out.

The authors find that social media is the least trusted institution among the ones proposed to the respondents in the framework of the EVS 2017. It is also found that trust in political institutions spills over to trust in social media, in accordance with the “trust-nexus” hypothesis. Yet, only 15% of respondents display less trust in social media after the controversy, while 65% remain table and 20% even show an increment. So far, theoretical explanations failed to explain this change patterns. The data do show that respondents with little confidence in politics have increased confidence in social media. Perhaps it is true that people who oppose the government and mainstream media turn out to see more opportunities in social media to go against that government. Only additional research can unravel this complexity.

EVS data collected in The Netherlands have been used by the Dutch team in response to quite some controversy this week after Kees van der Staaij, the fraction leader of the Reformed Political Party (an orthodox Calvinistic political party), signed the Dutch translation of the so-called Nashville-statement.
This declaration is supposedly providing a contemporary Christian stance towards ethical issues like homosexuality, transgenderism and gender roles. The Dutch team checked how progressive the electorates of the various parties are with respect to homosexuality by using the information collected in EVs2017 through the question whether people think homosexuality should never to always be justified. The team found that the Dutch who are most appealed by this Reformed Political Party are quite anti-lgbt, with a scale score close to the scale minimum. What’s more is that the youngest people attracted to this party are more negative towards homosexuality than elderly voters. Tim Reeskens (National Program director of EVS in the Netherlands) published a piece on this issue in the blog Social Vraagstukken. His interpretation of this controversy is, then, that marketing-wise, it serves the party quite well: as the only political party taking strong stance anti-lgbt, the party might attract some voters with similar homophobe opinions.  is, then, that marketing-wise, it serves the party quite well: as the only political party taking strong stance anti-lgbt, the party might attract some voters with similar homophobe opinions.