Get rid of that common citizen

In an effort to get close to people who nonetheless feel socially excluded despite all the good numbers, He investigates the Dutch Statistics Authority How do people living below the poverty line behave in the long term: can they recover? “What we’re seeing is that recovery becomes very difficult from a certain age,” says Tanya Tragg. Then people stay in this isolated situation. This naturally affects their feelings about social cohesion, trust, norms and prevailing values.

Paul Dekker is a professor of civil society at Tilburg University and has spent decades researching the opinion of the Dutch, since 2008 for reporting. Citizen Views Office of Social and Cultural Planning.

Figures and ideas are collected for this purpose through focus groups and surveys. The latter since 2020 with a representative selection of 5,000 families (more than 7,500 people) known to scientists as the ‘LISS Panel’. LISS is an acronym for Longitudinal Internet Studies of the Social Sciences.

“But even with such a fine sample it remains somewhat questionable,” says Paul Decker, “whether people with low confidence in institutions or other people would participate in such a committee as much.” And what does it do on average.

Do the friendly Dutch averages on social cohesion paint a very rosy picture? Opinions differ on this matter. That might be the case, say Tanya Tragg and Paul Decker. Very interesting, says Peer Scheepers, “but I have yet to see the first evidence of this.”

The Social and Cultural Planning Office has been warning for some time that social inequality is in danger of being ignored. in the current search difference in the Netherlands The SCP shows how the population is divided and where the dividing lines are or are threatened. in contemporary inequality, released in March, the SCP characterizes more emphatically than before social, cultural and personal capital (such as owning a network) and an attempt is made to classify the Netherlands into seven ‘latent’ or hidden classes, from the ‘top working class’ to the ‘precariat’ disenfranchised . The media has paid a lot of attention to these new names. What remains unrevealed is that the average social equality has hardly changed between 2014 and 2020. However, people at the bottom of the social ladder seem to test their status even less so. People at the top of the ladder also felt they had more status.

People at the bottom of the ladder also see more friction between population groups, often think European unification has gone too far and respond less positively to “most people can be trusted”. They often say they do not intend to vote and have less faith in politics. So your standing in society influences the experience of social cohesion, according to the SCP. This, in turn, can affect the extent to which you feel “individual” or not.

Much has been said about the rise of BoerBurgerBeweging about the “gap” between town and country. In light of this, it is remarkable that the party attracted so many votes in Rotterdam, for example. The SCP investigated how social discontent is distributed between social groups and regions in the Netherlands and will publish a report on this next week grim on society. This shows that issues such as education, network and income have a greater impact on social discontent than the Randstad and the region. The differences within regions appear to be greater than those between regions. Indeed, the researchers declared that the phrase “who a person is,” is “often more important than where the person lives.”