ALLBUS-Bibliographie 25. Fassung, Stand - SSOAR

660 ALLBUS-Bibliographie (25. Fassung)
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Raijman, Rebeca, Semyonov, Moshe und Schmidt, Peter, (2003). Do Foreigners Deserve
Rights? Determinants of Public Views Towards Foreigners in Germany and
Israel. European Sociological Review, 19: 379-392.
Abstract: "In the present paper we compare public views regarding the equality of
rights foreigners deserve in Germany and Israel using data from two national representative
samples (ALLBUS in Germany, 1996 and Attitudes Towards Minorities
Survey in Israel, 1999). The data reveal that anti-immigrant sentiments (as expressed
by the denial to grant rights to foreign workers) are more pronounced in Israel than in
Germany. These findings hold even after controlling for individual socio-economic
and demographic characteristics and differential levels of threat. In both countries,
support for foreigners' rights tend to increase with level of education and to decline
with age. In Germany, support for rights is also affected by income (positively),
right-wing orientation (negatively), and residence in East Germany (negatively). In
both countries, the most important determinant of support for foreigners' rights is the
perception of threat. The greater the threat the more likely citizens are to deny rights
to labour migrants. It should be noted, however, that the impact of threat on attitudes
towards foreigners' rights as well as the impact of political orientation (right-wing) is
more pronounces in Germany than in Israel. While threat is the more important determinant
of anti-foreigner sentiments in both societies, it only partially intervenes
between individual characteristics and attitudes toward foreigners' rights."
Aufgenommen: 19. Fassung, November 2003
Rainer, Helmut, (2006). Does Democracy Foster Trust? ISER Working Paper. Institute
for Social & Economic Research: Colchester.
Abstract: "The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of
microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals'
attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime
in which they live. The German reunification is a unique natural experiment that allows
us to conduct such a study. Using data from the German General Social Survey
(ALLBUS) and from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we obtain
two sets of results. On one side, we find that, shortly after reunification, East Germans
displayed a significantly less trusting attitude than West Germans. This suggests
a negative effect of communism in East Germany versus democracy in West
Germany on social and institutional trust. However, the experience of democracy by
East Germans since reunification did not serve to increase levels of social trust significantly.
In fact, we cannot reject the hypothesis that East Germans, after more than
a decade of democracy, have the same levels of social distrust as shortly after the
collapse of communism. In trying to understand the underlying causes, we show that