Erik Snel

Erasmus University Rotterdam | EUR · Department of Sociology

During the corona pandemic, governments of all countries appealed strongly to the trust of their populations by implementing drastic social and economic measures to prevent the spread of the virus. This study seeks to understand mechanisms that influence the level of institutional trust at the time of the corona pandemic. We are specifically intere...

The corona pandemic has a huge impact on the mental wellbeing of the Dutch population. Based on a large-scale panel survey (N = 22,696) on the social impact of COVID-19, this article firstly examines which social groups are most susceptible to the mental health consequences of the pandemic. Secondly, we examine whether social capital provides prote...

During the corona pandemic, governments of all countries made heavy demands on the trust of their populations by taking drastic social and economic measures to prevent the spread of the virus. In this study we aim to provide insight into mechanisms that influence the level of institutional trust during the corona pandemic. We are specifically inter...

This article explores how individuals with transnational lives handle emotion management in the form of cognitive and behavioural strategies. Transnational living is defined as spending substantial amounts of time and resources in two or more countries over a longer period. We use data derived through the ‘Transnational Lives in the Welfare State’...

The special issue: Migration Trajectories and Transnational Support Within and Beyond Europe brings together a set of papers with fresh empirical analysis from diverse settings documenting the experiences of migrants residing within and beyond the boundaries of Europe. This introductory article has the objective of laying the groundwork for a bette...

This paper investigates how the 2008–9 recession affected civic participation in disadvantaged and affluent neighbourhoods in the city of Rotterdam. We hypothesize that levels of civic participation may either diverge or converge across neighbourhoods with a different socioeconomic status. We build upon a recent wave of studies examining how civil...

Rotterdam kent een lange traditie van stadsmonitoring. Sinds 2014 wordt hiervoor het Wijkprofiel gebruikt, de opvolger van de Sociale en Veiligheidsindex. De gemeente Rotterdam gebruikt dit instrument om de stand van zaken in de stad en wijken in kaart te brengen. Sociologen van de Erasmus Universiteit hebben de afgelopen jaren verschillende onderz...

A central theme in criminology is how fear of crime is influenced by the residential context. Most researchers rely on administrative neighbourhoods to define context. These administrative units do not necessarily align with how inhabitants experience their local surroundings. The present study combines administrative neighbourhoods with a more inn...

Various authors have described the Netherlands as a ‘reluctant country of immigration’. Although the Netherlands was de facto an immigration country, until recently it seemed unwilling to admit it (Cornelius et al. 2004; Muus 2004; Van Meeteren et al. 2013). Similarly, with 174 different nationalities in the city, Rotterdam is characterised by ‘sup...

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most Western societies. Research suggests that these increasing levels of diversity could result in less neighborhood cohesion and more fear of crime. In this article, we examine both hypothesized outcomes of ethnic diversity, using survey data of the Dutch Safety Monitor 2014 in combination with detailed register...

The current retrenchment of European welfare states is putting more emphasis on citizen participation as an alternative for public services. This study examines differences in neighbourhood participation between urban neighbourhoods in Rotterdam in which, given their population composition, active citizen's participation is expected to differ. We a...

Contrary to natural born citizens, migrants can have a variety of legal statuses depending on how they are classified by immigration law. Together, such legal or ‘civic’ statuses constitute a system of civic stratification, from high (privileged) to low (restricted). Recent scholarship highlights the relevance of immigration law for understanding c...

The WRR publication 'The Fall of the Middle Class? Stability and Vulnerability in the Meddle Segment of Society' provides an insight into the changes that have occurred in the middle segment of Dutch society since the 1970s. The analysis encompasses four aspects: developments affecting people with middle incomes, with intermediate skills and in int...

De WRR verkenning 'De val van de middenklasse? Het stabiele en kwetsbare midden' geeft inzicht in de veranderingen in het middensegment van de Nederlandse samenleving sinds de jaren zeventig. Vier aspecten worden belicht: de ontwikkeling van middeninkomens, van middelbare opleidingen en van middenberoepen, en opvattingen over politiek en maatschapp...

An abundant body of research focused on macro-and micro-level factors explaining why individuals move across international borders. In this paper, we aim to complement such approaches by exploring how migration aspirations can be explained by meso-level factors, focusing on a case-study of Ukraine. We particularly focus on how migration aspirations...

‘Intra-EU mobility’ from new member states provides a governance challenge to European countries like the Netherlands. Freedom of movement within the EU enables mobility but also has important social consequences at the urban level in particular. This article discusses to what extent local, national and European governments have interacted in the g...

The editors of the report De val van de middenklasse? Het stabiele en kwetsbare midden (The fall of the middle class? The stable and vulnerable middle), published in 2017 by the WRR (The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy), respond to Rineke van Daalen's reflection (also in this issue) on their approach and main findings. Onder de...

The Netherlands has increasing numbers of working poor. Recent figures show that one in twenty working individuals in the Netherlands lives in a household below the poverty threshold. In Amsterdam, the in-work poverty risk is even higher than average; the reason for this research. The Amsterdam working poor are a heterogeneous category. Half of the...

This article analyses the contested nature of the contemporary intra-EU mobility regime after the EU enlargement of 2004 and 2007. Migration from the new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has evolved into one of the main migration flows within Europe, especially to Northern and Western European countries. We will analyse three di...

In this article we examine whether migrants' perceived discrimination in the country of settlement leads to an increase of their transnational involvement. So far, this so-called 'reactive transnationalism' has not been studied extensively. Based on literature on discrimination and transnationalism, reactive transnationalism is expected to be most...

This paper describes and tries to explain return intentions of Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian labour migrants in the Netherlands. Previous research has often emphasised the temporary or ‘liquid’ character of Central and Eastern European labour migration. We find that a substantial number of labour migrants intend to stay in the Netherlands for many...

In a recent collection of articles on the significance of the work by the American sociologist R.K. Merton, Charles Tilly (2010, p. 55) argued for mechanism-based explanations of the middle range. In his own words, ‘mechanistic explanations offer a distinctive, superior grasp of how social processes actually work’. Tilly’s plea fits in a developmen...

A key finding of contemporary migration research relates to the crucial role of social networks and informal support within migrant networks in the initiation and the continuation of migration flows between sending and receiving countries (Massey, 1990; Massey et al., 2005; Epstein, 2008; Faist, 2010; Boyd and Nowak, 2013). Migrant networks encoura...

This book set out to explore how migration at one time influences the subsequent patterns of movement. As noted in Introduction, this tendency for people to move in particular directions apparently following the pathways laid out by those who travelled before is well established in the migration literature, with many empirical examples of these mig...

The purpose of this article is to identify the occupational mobility trajectories of non-EU migrant workers in Europe and to test empirical data against the neoclassical human capital theory that predicts upward occupational mobility in the course of time and the segmented labour market theory that predicts immigrant’s confinement to secondary segm...

De hedendaagse overheid heeft hoge verwachtingen over actieve burgerparticipatie. Sociologen verwachten echter dat deze nadruk op burgerparticipatie tot nieuwe ongelijkheid tussen stadsbuurten leidt. In 'betere' buurten van de stad wonen rela-tief veel hoogopgeleiden en autochtonen, categorieën die vanouds meer maatschap-pelijk actief zijn. In kwet...

In deze notitie vergelijken we twee methoden om migranten uit Midden- en Oost-Europa longitudinaal te volgen. Het is daarmee een methodologische notitie die beschrijft hoe het panelonderzoek volgens beide methoden is verlopen. Daarbij wordt o.a. ingegaan op de mate van paneluitval en op de vraag in hoeverre deze uitval selectief is.

PurposeTo identify the trajectories of occupational mobility among non-EU immigrant workers in Europe and to test empirical data against neoclassical human capital theory that predicts upward occupational mobility and labor market segmentation theories proposing immigrant confinement to secondary segments. Methodology/approachData from survey and s...

Abstract Studies aimed at understanding different post-return experiences point at various factors that are involved. In this article, we show the importance of striving for a contextualized understanding of post-return experiences as different factors appear to be important in different cases. Our study sets out to seek the value of the theory of...

Mothers on Social Assistance: Poverty, Resilience and Parenting Although prior research showed that poverty is related to less optimal child outcomes, how the duration of poverty and parental psychological resilience affect the parenting quality is less well understood. To help fill this gap, we used data from a survey of mothers on social assistan...

This study examines the relation between the size and composition of social networks of people and the degree of civic and political participation using survey data of the GEIT ONIES -project in six European cities (Lisbon, Bilbao, Thessaloniki, Vienna, Warsaw and Rotterdam). In like with Robert Putnam's findings, we expected respondents with large...

Civic stratification is a relatively new dimension of social inequality in contemporary Western societies. States grant, or deny, different legal statuses and related social and economic rights. European Union (EU) nationals, for instance, have full rights to settle and work in other EU countries. Most EU countries have made an exception for nation...

In this article we develop an empirically grounded typology of labour migration patterns among migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, based on two dimensions: attachment to the destination country and attachment to the country of origin. We conducted a survey (N=654) among labour migrants in the Netherlands from Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. We...

Ten central and eastern European countries, along with Cyprus and Malta, joined the European Union in two waves between 2004 and 2007. This volume presents new research on the patterns of migration that resulted from the EU's enlargement. The contributors identify and analyze several new groups of migrants, notably young people without family oblig...

In the late 1990s, the German sociologists Leisering and Leibfried (1999) argued that most poverty is of a temporary nature. In their poverty study in the German city of Bremen, Leisering and Leibfried found that more than half of all social assistance claimants were out of poverty within a year. Based on their work, individualization theorists suc...

A Continent Moving West? argues that the conceptualization of migration as a one-way or long-term process is becoming increasingly wide of the mark. Rather, east-west labor migration in Europe, in common perhaps with other flows in and from other parts of the world, is diverse, fluid, and influenced by the dynamics of local and sector-specific labo...

De uitbreiding van de Europese Unie heeft geleid tot een toenemende inter-ne mobiliteit in Europa. De nieuwe, omvangrijke arbeidsmigratie uit Polen, Roemenië en Bulgarije naar Nederland is daar een voorbeeld van. Die arbeids-migratie neemt verschillende vormen aan en leidt tot verschillende patro-nen van integratie: 1) tijdelijke, circu-laire migra...

The reformation of capitalist economies due to deindustrialization has given rise to joblessness and fragmentation, reshaping traditional working class suburbs into reservoirs of poverty and social deprivation. Such elements of marginality give birth to a discourse about problematic areas, parallel societies and even ghettoes developing within weal...

Contemporary pleas for an activating welfare state and social security system emphasize that getting benefit claimants back to work is more important than providing income compensation for social risks connected with unemployment or illness. The Dutch system of incapacity benefits, however, is far removed from this normative ideal of a proactive so...

div>The family lives of immigrants and ethnic minority populations have become central to arguments about the right and wrong ways of living in multicultural societies. While the characteristic cultural practices of such families have long been scrutinized by the media and policy makers, these groups themselves are beginning to reflect on how to ma...

INTRODUCTION - Until recently, scholars argued that different welfare state regimes create different kinds of poverty. The typical face of poverty in liberal welfare states such as the USA is that of the working poor. The relatively large number of working poor in the USA is a consequence of the central characteristics of a liberal welfare state (E...

In this paper, the issue of changing labour-market opportunities and the position of members of minority groups in advanced service economies is addressed, focusing on the Dutch case. We distinguish between two social hierarchies, one of traditional ‘fordist’ occupations and one of post-fordist occupations. Compared to the native Dutch, all immigra...

Abstract In this article we offer a quantitative examination of the extent to which migrants from various countries are involved in transnational activities and have transnational identifications. The study is based on a survey of 300 immigrants (from the USA, Japan, Iraq, former-Yugoslavia, Morocco and the Dutch Antilles) living in the Netherlands...

"De Sociologische Gids is wereldbeschouwelijk noch methodisch-wetenschappelijk eenzijdig gebonden. Hij toetst slechts aan deze maatstaven: objectief binnen de grenzen van het mogelijke, wezenlijk belangrijk voor de sociale wetenschappen, verhelderend ten aanzien van de sociale realiteit." Met deze beknopte ‘beginselverklaring’ startte de toenmalige...

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, increased levels of east to west immigration in Europe partly explains the delinquent activities among a growing number of Eastern Europeans in western cities. Young people from te former Yugoslavia have a reputation for being particularly violent. In this article we argue that the alleged violence among Yugoslav...