Public Attitudes to Welfare, Climate Change and Energy in the EU and Russia (PAWCER)

The goal of the PAWCER project is to conduct comparative research on public attitudes to welfare, climate change and energy, all of which are relevant to understanding conflict, identity, and memory. While economic challenges threaten the fundamental relations of solidarity in European welfare states, climate change is likely to become the leading environmental driver of human conflict, and energy to continue fueling geopolitical tensions. Methods, data: Cross-national analyses of survey and contextual data will be used to examine discrepancies and similarities, as well as diverging and converging trends between public attitudes to these topics, thus unraveling the sources and patterns of mutual understanding and cooperation and of potential conflicts in and between EU countries and Russia. The research will be based on the collection of survey data and the analyses of both existing and new data sets. Data will be collected through the European Social Survey. The ESS is an academically driven biennial cross-national survey, measuring the attitudes, beliefs and behavior patterns of diverse populations. It has been awarded European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) status in December 2013. PAWCER will allow Russia to join ESS Round 8, for which fieldwork will start in September 2016 and so create a basis for long-term cooperation. PAWCER delivers innovative and relevant knowledge on attitudes towards solidarity and energy issues by: 1) delivering high quality, comprehensive and cross-culturally comparable data on two important issues for todays societies in Europe and Russia integrated in a broad survey including other important public attitudes like political trust or basic human values; 2) building on current state-of-the-art research in the two topics but expanding it to the Russian context; 3) disclosing similarities and differences between attitudes towards solidarity and energy issues within and between countries in Europe and Russia, thus pointing towards areas of mutual understanding as well as potential conflict using the ESS data.

No additional funding sources recorded.