Peter Achterberg

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Tilburg University

This study provides a first empirical test of Margaret Canovan's influential argument on the relationship between democracy and populism, which posits that populism emerges as a consequence of the unresolved conflict between the pragmatic and redemptive faces of democracy. Despite its impact on scholars of populism, the implications of her framewor...

As interest in universal basic income (UBI) policy has peaked in recent years, the study of public support for such a policy is rapidly developing. While recent studies recognise the multidimensionality of the UBI proposal, we still know little about to what extent support for UBI is unambiguously supported or rejected. We show that the public hold...

Universal Basic Income (UBI) found its way back to media and policy agendas, presented as an alternative to the social investment policies omnipresent in Europe. In spite of the apparent appeal, however, UBI faces a discursive and political stalemate that seems hard to overcome. In an attempt to understand this tension, we explore the discursive co...

In this study, we address the question of whether individuals that live in more detraditionalized countries have higher levels of mental illness and mental health professional care use. We argue that it is meaningful to consider the different facets of detraditionalization, that is the level of secularization, the ethos of personal autonomy, and se...

Universal Basic Income (UBI) reached political agendas as a proposal to radically reform welfare systems, followed by scholarly interest in its public legitimacy. While surveys find UBI support to be mostly redistribution-driven, the discussion in science and media suggests a more nuanced understanding. To comprehensively grasp the public response...

In this study, we investigate whether, and why, individuals express different levels of acceptance of surveillance depending on their educational level, and whether this relationship varies with the level of digitalization and globalization expansion of their country. Additionally, we ask whether the type of surveillance (online surveillance vs cam...

This large-scale statistical study tests the validity of two factors that explain why social entrepreneurs measure their social impact as addressed by qualitative case based research. For this purpose, data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2015-survey is used to test the significance of the ‘measuring to prove’ and ‘measuring to improve’ di...

Educational gaps are increasingly salient as skills and knowledge gain prominence in digital societies. E-privacy management, namely, the ability to control the flow of information about the self, is an important asset nowadays, since a skillful use of digital technologies enables full participation in social life and limits the exposure to unwarra...

Following up on suggestions that the cultural authority of science is multifaceted, this chapter demonstrates the existence of a science confidence gap: some people place great trust in scientific methods and principles, but simultaneously distrust scientific institutions. This science confidence gap proves largest among the less educated and this...

How to make sense of the current COVID-19 crisis? While many people rely on official statements made by governments, scientific institutions, and experts for answering this question, others do not. Recently, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported on people who adhere to the conspirational theory that the current COVID-19 crisis is linked to t...

In this chapter, we present evidence of the role of cultural worldviews in lay interpretations of truth and falsity. Following in the footsteps of Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) we demonstrate firstly that ‘hierarchical individualists’ are less likely to believe in the actual occurrence of climate change than their ‘egalitarian’ and ‘communitarian’ c...

System justification theory proposes that people are motivated to perceive the existing social system as fair, legitimate, and desirable. However, status‐legitimacy effect, understood as the most disadvantaged living in the most unequal contexts experiencing this need most strongly, has only found mixed support in empirical works. This article pres...

People support welfare policy if its beneficiaries are perceived as deserving of support. This study found that individuals’ cultural worldviews play a role in assessing the deservingness of welfare recipients. We investigated whether four different cultural profiles find some beneficiaries to be more deserving than others and how this relates to s...

The finding that ethnic prejudice is particularly weakly developed among those with interethnic friendships is often construed as confirming the so-called ‘contact theory,’ which holds that interethnic contact reduces racial prejudice. This theory raises cultural–sociological suspicions, however, because of its tendency to reduce culture to an alle...

In this study, we test to what extent an educational video on the intricacies of antibiotic resistance affects public attitudes towards antibiotic resistance and how such information is absorbed by the most likely targets of public health campaigns. We use a representative sample of 2037 individuals (from 2016) to test how people respond to a video...

Recent insights have shown subjective status to impact health and health behavior. It is however unclear how this exactly happens. In this study we explore two mechanisms: this of a direct, mediating effect of subjective status explaining the impact of material class on health outcomes and behavior and an indirect, moderating impact on the relation...

Material class and subjective social status regressed on Unhealthy Behaviors including control variables. (PDF)

Descriptives of the ELSA and Whitehall II-sample. (PDF)

Material class and subjective social status regressed on the separate health biomarkers with control variables. (PDF)

This work investigates the educational divide in e-privacy skills in Europe. We ask whether the gap exists at the level of the individuals, and subsequently we seek to frame it in the European context by using the reflexive modernization theory. By using data from the Flash Eurobarometer 443 and implementing multilevel linear regression models, we...

The finding that ethnic prejudice is particularly weakly developed among those with interethnic friendships is often construed as confirming the so-called ‘contact theory,’ which holds that interethnic contact reduces racial prejudice. This theory raises cultural–sociological suspicions, however, because of its tendency to reduce culture to an alle...

In light of recent claims about increasing religious polarization in secularized countries, we study the extent to which the non-religious contest religion in Western European countries and whether and how the Protestant and Catholic heritage of these countries plays a role in this. Analyzing data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP...

In this article, we analyze Special Eurobarometer (2010) data via multilevel regression modeling and answer two questions: (a) How a country’s democratization level is related to the rate of public engagement with science and (b) who are those citizens who participate in science policy-shaping and express their approval for democratic governance of...

The traditional approach to class voting has largely ignored the question whether material class positions coincide with subjective class identification. Following Sosnaud et al. (2013), this study evaluates party preferences when Europeans' material and subjective social class do not coincide. Seminal studies on voting behavior have suggested that...

Post-secular theory nowadays critiques the secularization notion that religion has increasingly become a private issue. It does so by pointing out how religion has once again become paramount to public and political debate, central to which are assertively voiced critiques of Muslims and Islam. Therefore, in this paper, we analyse cross-national su...

The literature about secularization proposes two distinct explanations of anti-Muslim sentiment in secularized societies. The first theory understands it in terms of religious competition between Muslims and the remaining minority of orthodox Protestants; the second understands it as resulting from value conflicts between Muslims and the non-religi...

This paper addresses the issue of public acceptance of vaccination with specific attention being paid to the role of education in vaccine uptake. Using Flash Eurobarometer 287 (2009) survey data and exploring it through the lens of Beck's reflexive modernization and Roger's protection motivation theories we examined how individual-level factors aff...

In this paper, we analyze the biannual European Social Surveys (from 2002 to 2014) in order to find out how public trust in the justice system has changed in 27 European countries. More specific, it tests two hypotheses, which predict how in these countries support for the justice system has evolved. The first tests the reflexive-modernization hypo...

The political situation in the Soviet Union during the twentieth century has led some to suggest that socialism is some kind of secular religion as opposed to ‘normal’ religion. In modern Europe, however, there have been vibrant Christian socialist movements. This article looks into the different attitudes of socialists towards religion and answers...

The political situation in the Soviet Union during the twentieth century has led some to suggest that socialism is some kind of secular religion as opposed to ‘normal’ religion. In modern Europe, however, there have been vibrant Christian socialist movements. This article looks into the different attitudes of socialists towards religion and answers...

Following up on suggestions that attitudes toward science are multi-dimensional, we analyze nationally representative survey data collected in the United States in 2014 (N = 2006), and demonstrate the existence of a science confidence gap: some people place great trust in scientific methods and principles, but simultaneously distrust scientific ins...

Sociologie in Nederland: graag minder van hetzelfde! Debat: Rethink Sociology.

The political situation in the Soviet Union during the twentieth century has led some to suggest that socialism is some kind of secular religion as opposed to ‘normal’ religion. In modern Europe, however, there have also been vibrant Christian socialist movements. This paper looks into the different attitudes of socialists towards religion and answ...

Highlights - We comment on a recent study on information provision on potable recycled water. - Worldviews moderate effects of information on knowledge and positive responses. - Significant effects only exist among those already comfortable with new technology. - Those least likely to support recycled water are unaffected by new information. Abst...

‘The belief in the value of scientific truth is not derived from nature but is a product of definite cultures’ – Max Weber (1949: 110)

Since the mid-1980s, welfare state arrangements have become increasingly conditional and austere. Simultaneously, deservingness perceptions have become increasingly important. This paper examines preferences as to which social categories contemporary welfare state reforms should target. Using unique data from a 2006 Dutch survey, the results reveal...

Since the mid-1980s, welfare state arrangements have become increasingly conditional and austere. Simultaneously, deservingness perceptions have become increasingly important. This paper examines preferences as to which social categories contemporary welfare state reforms should target. Using unique data from a 2006 Dutch survey, the results reveal...

a b s t r a c t The public acceptance of hydrogen technology has been the topic of many social-scientific studies. Whereas most of these studies rely on cross-sectional survey data, this paper analyses pooled data from representative surveys done in 2008 and in 2013, enabling to investigate whether and how exactly the public acceptance of hydrogen...

A recent study scrutinized the effects of providing people with information about suspended sentences on their opinions of these sentences, and concluded that the impact is modest or even absent. Re-analyzing the original data, we demonstrate that this conclusion greatly underestimates the relevance of informational provision. Recognizing that info...

Sociology and Culture: An Unhappy Marriage Sociology took shape in the nineteenth century as an offshoot of Enlightenment thought, which critiqued religion, tradition, and belief as sources of ignorance and tutelage, conceiving of science, reason, and technology as their superior successors. These Enlightenment roots have had profound and lasting e...

Gebaseerd op een onzorgvuldige weergave van ons werk levert Oudenampsen onheuse en ongefundeerde kritiek. Oudenampsen spreekt zich daarbij in forse bewoordingen uit tegen 'slechte' sociologie, maar tragisch genoeg bezaait hij de weg naar goede sociologie zelf met obstakels. Inleiding Een 'gemankeerd begrippenapparaat', 'aan achteloosheid grenzende...

Since the 1970s, the so-called ‘crisis of sociology’ has sparked intellectual quests for a ‘disenchanted’ sociology. This is a sociology that acknowledges its incapacity to legislate ‘objective’ meaning on the basis of an alleged scientific insight in ‘social reality as it really is’. One major outcome of these quests for intellectual reconstructio...

For various reasons the process of individualization has always been supposed to be linked to a decline in welfare state support. Because of individualization, it is commonly argued people appreciate collectively organized welfare less and less. This article studies whether individualists really support the welfare state less than collectivists. In...

Previous studies have linked anti-immigrant voting and other indications of ethnic animosities to ethnic segregation, yielding different results. In this study, we focus on the locally strongly diverging support for Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid [PVV]) in the Dutch national parliamentary elections of 2006 and 2010 to as...

Volgens veel wetenschappers onderscheiden nieuw-rechtse populistische partijen zich van andere partijen door hun nadruk op een autoritaire culturele agenda. Als zelfverklaarde verdedigers van de belangen van de autochtone ‘gewone man’ nemen nieuw-rechtse partijen echter ook stelling in kwesties rond de verzorgingsstaat. In dit artikel onderzoeken w...

This article aims to move beyond media discourse about "new atheism" by mapping and explaining anti-religious zeal among the public at large in 14 Western European countries. We analyze data from the International Social Survey Program, Religion III, 2008, to test two theories about how country-level religiousness affects anti-religiosity and its s...

Whereas electoral support for new-rightist parties is often understood as driven by ethnocentric anti-immigrant sentiments, scholars have noted that new-rightist politicians have, surprisingly, stressed culturally progressive arguments in the last decade. Using recent Dutch survey data (N = 1,302) especially collected for this purpose, the article...

This article examines the extent to which four major trends in welfare state reform – privatisation, increasing selectivity, increasing activation and increasing discipline – are supported and how this support can be explained. Using recent public opinion data of the Dutch population, it is found that there are two ideological dimensions underlying...

Politici als Geert Wilders die stellen: ' Als ik niet zou wor-den vrijgesproken, dan hebben, denk ik, miljoenen men-sen in Nederland terecht geen vertrouwen meer in de rechterlijke macht in Nederland. Ik hoop dat dat niet gebeurt, want ik kan die mensen dan niet meer ongelijk geven als ze een bijl zetten aan de wortel van wat toch iets heel belangr...

Based on a representative sample of the Dutch population (N = 2467), we test four hypotheses about how utilitarian individualism influences the responsibilization of work-related risks (i.e. the risk of dropping out of work because of unemployment, disability, or sickness). The risk society hypothesis understands utilitarian individualism as a lais...

Aan de hand van een recent (in 2012) uitgevoerde enquête onder een representatieve uitsnede van de bevolking, onderzoeken wij of wantrouwen ten aanzien van de rechtsstaat deel uitmaakt van een meer algemeen institutioneel onbehagen. We vinden dat wantrouwen tegenover deze institutie samenvalt met andere vormen van institutioneel wantrouwen – bijvoo...

Next to their well-documented authoritarian cultural agenda, new-rightist populist parties have developed specific views on the welfare state: welfare chauvinism and welfare populism. This article studies the electoral relevance of these views for Dutch new-rightist populist parties by means of survey data representative of the Dutch population (N...

This research note studies experimentally how the public translates information about hydrogen technology into evaluations of the latter. It does so by means of a nationally representative factorial survey in the Netherlands (n = 1,012), in which respondents have been given seven randomly selected pieces of (negative, positive and/or neutral) infor...

This pioneering study investigates the consequences of social indivualization and economic globalization on the welfare state. With a particular focus on solidarity, or the willingness to accept shared risks, the editors look at the dynamics between the aging and the young, the healthy and the sick, and the working and unemployed within welfare sta...

This pioneering study investigates the consequences of social indivualization and economic globalization on the welfare state. With a particular focus on solidarity, or the willingness to accept shared risks, the editors look at the dynamics between the aging and the young, the healthy and the sick, and the working and unemployed within welfare sta...

Inleiding 'Wetenschap is ook maar een mening', kopte NRC.Next op 14 September 2011 – een stelling die treffend samenvat hoe veel Nederlandse burgers tegenwoordig oordelen over wetenschappelijke kennis. Het typisch moderne onderscheid tussen objectieve kennis en morele waarden, feit en fictie, fantasie en werkelijkheid lijkt minder scherp dan voorhe...

It is often assessed that the construction of nature, technology and the relation between both is in the midst of a restructuring without specifying exactly what different articulations can be distinguished and how they differ from the modern notion of nature being separated from and domesticated by technology. Through an analysis of car commercial...

The rebirth of fact-free politics. Pim Fortuyn and the new counterculture (2002-2012) In this paper we analyze Fortuyn’s political inheritance in the Netherlands. Going beyond the mere electoral popularity of his neo-rightist successors, we analyze the changing political culture since Fortuyn entered the political stage. More specifically we show t...

This article aims to study to what extent the share of immigrants in a country influences individuals’ perceptions of ethnic threat and how this can be explained by theories of economic and cultural threat. Following an economic logic, people with a weak socio-economic position should have a greater perception of ethnic threat. This would be more s...

The literature on welfare state legitimacy generally views economic egalitarianism and support for the welfare state as closely related phenomena that can be measured by means of scales that are considered highly interchangeable. This research note argues that economic egalitarianism does not necessarily coincide with support for the welfare state....

In this article, the authors address the question of whether and how the appreciation of popular music consumers has globalized in the four decades since the mid-1960s. They use information from American, Dutch, French, and German popular music charts from 1965 through 2006. They find no corroboration for an overall trend toward an internationaliza...

A major shortcoming in the existing literature on welfare state legitimacy is that it cannot explain when social policy designs follow public preferences and when public opinion follows existing policy designs and why. Scholars examining the influence of public opinion on welfare policies, as well as scholars investigating institutional influences...

Some studies fi nd that interethnic propinquity leads to ethnic tolerance, while others conclude that it underlies ethnic confl ict. Using data on 50 Dutch cities in 2006 and 2010, this article assesses whether the consequences of interethnic propinquity for votes for Wilders’s PVV – the Dutch anti-immigrant party par excellence – are conditional o...

1. Introduction “After nearly three centuries of utterly failed prophesies and misrepresentations of both present and past, it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper ‘requiescat in pace’” (Stark 1999: 269). Stark’s words, published just before the turn of the century, may count on...

Various studies have demonstrated that while the lower educated support economic redistribution more than the higher educated do, they nonetheless dislike welfare support for immigrants more strongly. This paper aims to explain this remarkably particularistic application of the principle of economic egalitarianism (‘welfare chauvinism’) by testing...

Laagopgeleiden zijn meer dan hoogopgeleiden geneigd om voorkeur voor economische herverdeling gepaard te laten gaan met afkeer van sociale voorzieningen ten bate van etnische minderheden. Waarom zijn zij van mening dat sommigen gelijker zijn dan anderen? In dit artikel wordt onderzocht of hun opmerkelijke combinatie van economisch egalitarisme en ‘...

a b s t r a c t In most papers concerning the public evaluation of hydrogen technology it is found that the general public is generally supportive of hydrogen technology and the knowledge about hydrogen is fairly low. In this paper we hypothesize that several cultural predispositions such as environmental concern and trust in technology play a key...

The literature concerned with bibliometry and scientometry has been concerned with the question of how the actual output and impact of scholars can be ascertained. Whereas a situation in which scholars were mainly judged of subjective criteria was deemed undesirable, scientometry has developed new strategies based on objective criteria such as the...

Inleiding Nederland heeft zich lang kunnen koesteren in de illusie dat hier te lande voor extreem-rechtse en rechts-populistische politieke partijen geen draagvlak bestond. In de jaren tachtig wisten de Centrum Democraten van Hans Janmaat weliswaar enige electorale steun te verwerven, maar nieuw rechts bleef in Nederland al met al toch een betrekke...

This article elaborates and tests the so-called theory of the new political culture (Ronald Inglehart et al.) by means of the Dutch part of the European Social Survey (2002). The analysis is restricted on theoretical grounds to voting for parties representing new politics (centering on cultural issues: populist party (LPF, new right) versus green p...

Analysis of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data collected in 18 Western countries in 1998 demonstrates that Christian desires for a public role of religion are strongest in countries where Christian religiosity is numerically most marginal. Moreover, Dutch data covering the period 1970–1996 confirm that the decline of the number of Chri...

In this article we try to investigate the empirical validity of the convergence thesis, which assumes that welfare states are increasingly similar because more generous universal welfare states are adopting policies of retrenchment and neo-liberalization. Using data on the popularity of neo-liberal ideology, welfare state expenditures and the gener...

In studies of mass ideology, it is often found that political values are ordered two-dimensionally among the public at large. In a first economic dimension, equality is contested; in a second cultural one, individual freedom is contested. While this general rule of two-dimensionality applies to the public at large, there are large differences betwe...

De ‘kloof tussen burger en politiek’ verandert steeds meer in een eufemisme voor een hartgrondige afkeer van, en zelfs regelrechte haat tegen, politieke en bureaucratische elites. De politieke articulatie van deze onvrede vindt met name plaats door populistische nieuw-rechtse partijen en bewegingen als Verdonks TON en Wilders’ PVV. Ook vertegenwoor...

Peilingen van Maurice de Hond per eind maart 2009 maakten duidelijk dat de PvdA, sinds 2006 met 33 zetels vertegenwoordigd in de Tweede Kamer, daarvan niet minder dan een derde deel zou moeten inleveren bij nieuwe verkiezingen. De grootste stijger zou Geert Wilders’ PVV worden, met een royale verdrievoudiging van haar huidige negen zetels tot meer...

In dit artikel wordt onderzocht of twee centrale aspecten van secularisering hand in hand gaan: een afname van het aantal christenen en een toenemende privatisering van het christelijk geloof. Via een analyse van gegevens over achttien westerse landen en voor Nederland over de periode van 1970 tot 1996 laat dit artikel zien dat afnemende christelij...