Guillem Vidal-Lorda

European Commission | ec · Joint Research Centre (JRC)

The two-party system in Spain collapsed in the aftermath of the Great Recession with the appearance of two new parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos. How are we to understand the sudden emergence of these new formations? Using 2015 and 2016 post-electoral survey data to map the ideological space and model voting behaviour, it is shown that economic votin...

The political effects of the Great Recession on southern Europe were substantial. The rapid economic deterioration of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain from 2008 onwards was accompanied by an increase in citizens’ dissatisfaction towards national political institutions. The sources of political mistrust in the southern periphery were of a political...

The article focuses on the party political spaces in four Southern European countries (i.e. Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) since the onset of the Euro crisis. To understand the emerging conflict structures, it argues for the need to consider that these countries simultaneously face an economic crisis and a political crisis and that both crises...

European Party Politics in Times of Crisis - edited by Swen Hutter and Hanspeter Kriesi June 2019

Wealth is a central determinant of life chances and intergenerational status persistence in modern societies. Yet, sociologists traditionally overlooked its role in class measurement and inequality, while most economists focused on the elites. This article reconciles sociological and economic perspectives on class analysis by examining the relation...

The idea of a Universal Inheritance (UI) has been recently gaining weight amongst scholars concerned over increasing wealth inequality. A UI consists of a one-off public payment of an agreed sum to each citizen of young adulthood. In this article, we provide the results of novel simulations to assess the cost and the distributive impact of such pol...

The DIGCLASS R package aims to simplify the translation between occupational social classes, coding most social class schema with just a few lines of code. It also includes other functions, such as converting or repairing the ISCO codes. It facilitates the translation of the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) from 1968, 198...

Are personal stories more effective in shaping opinion than experts' endorsements? This study investigates the persuasiveness of personal stories and expert endorsements in shaping public opinion on education spending and pollution reduction policies. Using a survey experiment in Spain, we found that personal stories consistently increased support...

Real Utopias for a Social Europe consists of technical debate-type workshops on various bold and innovative social policy proposals. Leading policy experts will come together to assess and discuss these policy proposals’ feasibility, distributional impact, costs, and scalability through evidence based on pilots and field experiments, microsimulatio...

Neo-Weberian occupational class schemas, rooted in industrial-age employment relations, are a standard socio-economic position measure in social stratification. Previous research highlighted Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP)-based schemas’ difficulties in keeping up with changing labour markets, but few tested alternative explanations. This arti...

The European Union is experiencing a rapid increase in inflation rates fuelled by energy prices and the war in Ukraine. The impact of the price increase is not equally distributed. In 8 out of 17 countries, lower-income groups whose consumption basket is mainly composed of essential goods are most affected by the increase in prices. Poorest househo...

EGP (Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero)-based occupational class schemas, rooted in industrial-age employment relations, are the standard measure of socioeconomic position in social stratification. Previous research highlighted EGP-based schemas’ difficulties to keep up with changing labour markets, but few tested alternative explanations. This articl...

Real Utopias for a Social Europe consists of technical debate-type workshops on various bold and innovative social policy proposals. Leading policy experts will come together to assess and discuss these policy proposals’ feasibility, distributional impact, costs, and scalability through evidence based on pilots and field experiments, microsimulatio...

The kick-off workshop was a high-level event with more than 100 participants that brought together 13 high-profile international experts on social inequality from different social science disciplines to discuss technological change and inequality, two topics directly under the European Commission’s priorities. The objective was to generate synergie...

How much do the prospects of international recognition of a possible new state affect the domestic support for secession? To answer this research question, we adopted a most similar systems design and conducted a Web‐based survey experiment in Catalonia and Scotland. Respondents were presented with plausible scenarios regarding the international re...

European Party Politics in Times of Crisis - edited by Swen Hutter June 2019

The Great Recession constituted a breaking point in several aspects of the cultural, economic and political life of southern European countries (i.e. Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain). This dissertation aims to shed light on the political consequences of the economic crisis in this region —with a specific focus on Spain as a paradigmatic case— by...