2011 - 2012
Contextualizing Contact Theory. How Urban Culture Affects the Impact of Interethnic Contact on Ethnocentrism
In this project, which has been funded by NWO in the Conflict and Security Theme, I assess the conditionality of Allport’s widely used contact thesis. Roughly put, according to that theory, the resistance towards ethnic minorities (shorthand: ethnocentrism) of members of ethnic majorities declines as the latter get into contact with the former. It is therefore often expected that members of the ethnic majority living in ethnically mixed neighbourhoods (i.e: potential interethnic neighbourhood contacts) are less ethnocentric than those living in ethnically homogeneous ones. Yet, empirical studies on this matter thus far yield scattered results: sometimes interethnic contact in neighbourhoods leads to less ethnocentrism, while sometimes it does not or even leads to more ethnocentrism.
The starting point of this research is the idea of Richard Florida that a tolerant cultural atmosphere (the primary examples of cities with such an atmosphere being Amsterdam, Berlin, San Francisco) positively affects the tolerance of the population, which has empirically been corroborated for the Dutch case in a previous study (together with Dick Houtman): Tolerance in the Post-Industrial City [PDF]. This guides the central expectation in this research project that the extent to which interethnic neighbourhood contacts lead to declining levels of ethnocentrism depends on the urban cultural atmosphere: such contacts are likely to lead to declining levels of ethnocentrism in cities with the most tolerant cultural atmosphere, while those in cities with the least culturally tolerant atmosphere probably do not. In the latter cities, interethnic contacts might even lead to increasing levels of ethnocentrism and its corollaries as interethnic distrust and support for anti-immigrant parties. Publications on these matters are under preparation in collaboration with Peter Achterberg, Willem de Koster, and Justus Uitermark.
2011
Welfare Chauvinism in Europe
This research project was awarded a Rubicon grant by NWO, and revolves around the question why the native European population considers immigrants less entitled to welfare than theirselves. It analyzes how proponents of welfare state redistribution – within countries: the less educated; across countries: inhabitants of the most generous welfare states – combine economic egalitarianism with this seemingly anti-egalitarian sentiment, a combination aptly described as ‘welfare chauvinism’. Partly inspired by insights gained in a study together with Peter Achterberg, Dick Houtman, Willem de Koster, and Katerina Manevska "Some are More Equal than Others" [PDF], the explanations for welfare chauvinism were sought in resistance towards cultural diversity, and ideas concerning reciprocity and competition over scarce resources. This research project has recently been completed, and was conducted in close collaboration with Wim van Oorschot at Tilburg University and the abovementioned colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
2005 - 2010
Economic Globalization and Urban Inequality
The research plan for My PhD project was awarded an NWO grant in the Urban Innovation Program (STIP: Stedelijk Innovatieprogramma). By focusing on the strategic Dutch case, it scrutinized the explanatory power of the central theoretical notions in the Global City Debate of Saskia Sassen and others on the impact of economic globalization on inequality within cities. More specifically, it assessed ideas concerning the relation between foreign direct investments and immigration on the one hand, and labour market phenomena such as post-industrialization, unemployment and labour substitution on the other. The resulting PhD thesis Unravelling the Global City Debate that I defended cum laude on June 4th 2010, has been awarded the bi-annual dissertation award for the best PhD thesis in Sociology by the Dutch Sociological Association 2009-2010 (NSV). This research project furthermore resulted in various publications in both Dutch peer-reviewed journals such as Sociologie, and international peer-reviewed journals such as Urban Studies and Urban Affairs Review, in collaboration with Jack Burgers and Dick Houtman.
2004 - 2005
Bachelor and Master theses
I completed my Master’s degree with the master thesis It’s Culture, Stupid! on the perceived decline in class voting in western societies since World War II. It reanalyzed this ‘decline’, and showed that theoretical and conceptual flaws in the standard research practice concealed that there actually is an increase in class voting. The crucial point is that the party preferences of occupational classes need to be theoretically and empirically disentangled into 1) class voting – i.e. voting on the basis of economic interests that pits the poor against the rich when it comes to support for economic redistribution – and 2) cultural voting – i.e. voting on the basis of cultural capital that pits the less educated against the highly educated when it comes to the extent to which individual freedom and cultural diversity are valued. Since the latter cross pressures the former, disentangling both types of voting reveals that the democratic class struggle is alive and kicking. Hence the title of the article (together with Peter Achterberg and Dick Houtman) based on my Master thesis that was published in Politics & Society: Class Is Not Dead – It Has Been Buried Alive [PDF]. The thesis was nominated for the bi-annual Master-thesis award of the Dutch Sociological Association (NSV), and the Dutch version of the article was awarded as the best article in political science in 2007 by the journal Res Publica.
Together with Willem de Koster I completed my Bachelor degree in 2004 by defending a thesis on the consequences of detraditionalization for value orientations and voting behaviour. It theoretically and empirically disentangled moral traditionalism which is rooted in Christianity, from authoritarianism, which results from anomie spawned by a lack of pre-given guidelines of thinking feeling and acting due to detraditionalization. It led to the publication Cultural Value Orientations and Christian Religiosity that was published in International Political Science Review [PDF]. The insights gained in this article still inform solutions for the research problems in political sociology that me and my colleagues at Erasmus University are currently dealing with.
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