Alexi Gugushvili

Links between equality of opportunity and health in post-COVID world must be an issue of general interest to academic, health, and policy audiences in the developed countries and other parts of the world. We already know that COVID-19 disproportionally affects most vulnerable and marginalised groups, while their positions in social hierarchy are strongly shaped by intergenerational transmission of advantages and disadvantages. Further, recent evidence from the United States and Europe also suggests that inequality of opportunity has significant negative consequences for health. This correspondence end with a call that decision makers, while rebuilding the post-COVID social model, should remember that equality of opportunity is not only fair but it is also good for health.

Could there be a symbiotic relationship between COVID-19 and conflict? On the one hand, circumstances associated with armed conflicts may give rise to greater spread of the virus, while, on the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic may create conditions for violence through heightened xenophobia and nationalism or may change the dynamics of existing conflicts. We illustrate this with the example of war in the South Caucasus, one of the hot spots of the pandemic. Elsewhere, COVID-19 may have reduced the intensity of conflicts in some places, but it also may have contributed to anti-government protests and communal violence. We call for greater emphasis on traditional public health measures in unstable settings coupled with actions to hasten the peaceful resolution of ongoing conflicts.

Background Income inequality is associated with poor health when economic disparities are especially salient. Yet, political institutions may alter this relationship because democracies (as opposed to autocracies) may be more inclined to frame inequalities in negative rather than positive ways. Living in a particular political system potentially alters the messages individuals receive about whether inequality is large or small, good or bad, and this, in turn, might affect whether beliefs about inequality influence health. Further, media coverage of economic inequality may negatively affect health if it contributes toward the general perception that the gap between rich and poor has gone up, even if there has been no change in income differentials. Methods In this study, we explore the relationship between democracy, perceptions of inequality, and self-rated health across 28 post-communist countries using survey and macro-level data, multilevel regression models, and inverse probability weighting to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated. Results We find that self-rated health is higher in more democratic countries and lower among people who believe that inequality has risen in the last few years. Moreover, we observe that people in democracies are more likely to learn about rising inequality through watching television and that when they do it has a more harmful effect on their health than when people in autocracies learn about rising inequality through the same channel, suggesting that in countries where there is less trust in the television media learning about rising inequality is not as harmful for health. Conclusions Our results indicate that while democracies are generally good for well-being, they may not be unambiguously positive for health. This does not mean, of course, that inequality is good for health nor that, on average, autocracies have better health than democracies; but rather that being more aware of inequality can negatively affect self-rated health.

Purpose In this study, we investigate whether individuals’ BMI categories are associated with being dissatisfied with one’s life, how this association is affected by the social comparison that individuals make, and what the role of the overall BMI levels in this process is. Methods We use data for 21,577 men and 27,415 women, collected in 2016 by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, from 34 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. To understand the moderating effect of contextual environment, we use multilevel mixed effect logistic regression models and data for national, regional, and cohort-specific BMI levels. Result We find that the association of BMI and dissatisfaction with life differs by gender, with overweight men being less likely to be dissatisfied with life than men with normal weight and obese women being more likely to be dissatisfied with life compared to women with normal weight. For contextual effects, we find that obese women in regions with low BMI levels are more likely to be dissatisfied with life. The effect of obesity on female life dissatisfaction is not observed in regions with high BMI levels. As for men, regional BMI levels affect the levels of life dissatisfaction but only for underweight men. Conclusions Our study adds additional nuance to the quality-of-life research by showing that the association between BMI and decreased life satisfaction is, at least partially, moderated by the contextual environment, and that the character of these effects differs by gender.

One’s current socioeconomic position is intimately tied to one’s health status. Further, childhood living conditions also exert lasting effects on the health of adults. However, studies on changes in one’s socioeconomic position over the life course rarely find consistent and systematic effects of social mobility for individual health and wellbeing. Such studies almost exclusively draw on objective measures of social mobility and do not consider subjective appraisals of social mobility by individuals themselves. We conduct an analysis of cross-sectional, representative German survey data to explore the question as to how subjective perceptions as opposed to objective accounts of occupational status mobility affect five self-reported health and wellbeing outcomes differentially. We show that objective and subjective accounts of social mobility overlap, yet this association is far from perfect. Further, there are relatively small associations between objective and subjective mobility accounts and health outcomes. Associations between subjective mobility perceptions and health outcomes are intriguingly independent of objective social mobility trajectories. Mismatches between objective and subjective mobility are also correlated with some health outcomes. We discuss implications of our findings that social mobility is associated with those aspects of health which are more closely related to psychological wellbeing rather than physical health.

The Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN, one of the longest continuously run panel studies in Europe, is designed to facilitate research on the socio-economic structure in Poland, inequalities and the individual life course under conditions of social change. POLPAN is well suited for studying how women and men's health and wellbeing are influenced by their life conditions, such as financial and social resources, that Poland's post-1989 profound socio-economic transformations impacted, and how health outcomes further shape individuals’ attitudes and behaviours. Initiated in 1987-88, POLPAN has been fielded in five-year intervals, most recently in 2018, with wave-specific samples representative of the Polish adult population and response rates for full panelists consistently above 70%. In POLPAN, health assessment measures are collected in all waves, as part of respondents’ multi-dimensional and life course inequality profile. Data on self-rated physical and psychological health, collected since 1998 (Wave Three), are complemented with respondents’ Nottingham Health Profile and core anthropometric information about personal weight and height (Wave Five onwards); health and wellbeing related reasons for work interruptions (since Wave Four); information on extensive hospital stays (Wave Six onwards) and respondents’ chronic or protracted illnesses (in Wave Six), respondents’ disability status (all waves). The newly released integrated 1988-2018 POLPAN dataset is available on Harvard Dataverse, or upon request, via e-mail: polpan@ifispan.waw.pl.

Recent electoral outcomes in many Western welfare democracies show a rise in voting for populist political options. Arguably, the two most impactful cases of this kind are the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the results of the referendum conducted in 2016 in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, popularly known as “Brexit.” Public health scholars and health professionals are already identifying ongoing and projected consequences of these electoral outcomes in terms of the effects on health care services and on the broader social determinants of health. After a steady decline in the level of the uninsured population in the United States, the recent data suggest that the number of uninsured people might be rising again, while in the United Kingdom, even the most positive Brexit scenarios are projected to lead to an overall negative effect on the National Health Service.

Recent evidence suggests that popular disaffection with liberal-democratic norms and institutions has been growing in different regions of the world, but studying the social origins of democratic versus authoritarian political preferences are especially relevant in countries with immature democratic practices. The main concern of this article is the association between intergenerational social mobility and support for democracy in post-socialist societies. I present a theoretical framework in which individuals’ political attitudes are affected by their intergenerational social mobility experiences. I model this theoretical argument using two complementary data-sets and various multivariable and multilevel statistical techniques. The results indicate that intergenerational social mobility, particularly its subjective perception, has statistically significant links with attitudes towards democracy and that this association is moderated by the attained level of democracy in the country where an individual resides. This may suggest that studying social origins of support for democracy by means of intergenerational social mobility can be an important tool to understand the conundrum of democratisation and democratic backsliding in post-socialist societies.

Socio-economic comparison among individuals is the process by which individuals assess their own socio-economic position in relation to others. In this study we identify which are the most salient groups in socio-economic comparisons among individuals, clarify the role of individual-level characteristics in the selection of specific comparison groups, and test if contextual factors explain variation in individuals’ choices regarding their socio-economic comparison groups. We utilise a unique data-set that allows the choice of socio-economic comparison groups in 34 countries in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe and Central Asia to be investigated. The results indicate that individuals make socio-comparisons not only with close groups, such as friends and neighbours, but also within their own families, cross-nationally, and over time. Multilevel and multivariable analyses suggest that individuals’ demographic and socio-economic characteristics and the extent of their social trust are significantly linked with the selection of specific comparison groups. We also find that the distance from the city of Frankfurt in Germany of countries where individuals live is an important factor in why people compare their own socio-economic position with those who live in Western Europe.

This study explores individual and contextual explanations of why some people perceive themselves as being mobile and others do not. While subjective social position in recent decades has become an important topic of sociological enquiry, only a handful of studies explicitly investigate the nature of subjective perception of intergenerational mobility. When assessing their performance in comparison to their parents, individuals are likely to consider many other aspects of their lives than the attainment of socio-economic position. For empirical analysis, I operationalise an objective indicator of intergenerational mobility, often assumed to be the central explanation of perceptions of mobility, by means of intergenerational educational trajectories. In addition to exploring individual-level explanations, I use multilevel mixed-effects Poisson regression models to test how contextual environment is associated with perceived intergenerational mobility across 35 societies in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Results indicate that an objective measure of intergenerational mobility and other individual-level factors are important explanations of subjective intergenerational mobility. Further, the difference in economic development between individuals’ birth years and the year of interview is the most salient contextual factor explaining perceived intergenerational mobility, while contemporary economic development and short-term economic growth also reduce the likelihood of perceived downward mobility. The findings of this study contribute to sociological literature by highlighting the importance of contextual environment and factors beyond socio-economic characteristics for individuals’ perception of intergenerational mobility.

Background This study investigates if intergenerational equality of opportunity is linked to mortality in 30 European countries. Equality of opportunity may lead to greater returns on health investments and, consequently, improved health outcomes. In turn, a perceived lack of fairness in the distribution of life chances and limited possibilities for upward intergenerational mobility can cause anxiety among individuals and gradually compromise their health. Methods We used information on 163 467 individuals’ and their parents’ Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status from a large survey data set—the European Social Survey—to generate three complementary measures of equality of opportunity. We then linked these to administrative data on total, gender-specific and cause-specific mortality rates assembled by Eurostat from the national statistical offices. Results We found that lower equality of opportunity, measured by the attainment of individuals from the lowest and highest quartiles of socioeconomic status and by the overall intergenerational correlation in socioeconomic status, was related to higher mortality rates, particularly in relation to diseases of the nervous system and the sense organs, diseases of the respiratory system and external causes of mortality. Our measures of equality of opportunity were more consistently linked with mortality of men than women. Conclusion Equality of opportunity may be an important explanation of mortality that warrants further research. Measures that aim at facilitating intergenerational social mobility can be justified not only via normative considerations of equality of opportunity but also in terms of individuals’ chances to enjoy healthy lives.

The consequences of changing one’s socio-economic status over the life course—i.e. social mobility—for individual health are not well understood. Theories of the health implications of social mobility draw on the human perception of one’s changing conditions, but empirical studies mostly examine the health implications of moving from objectively defined indicators of parental socio-economic position such as education, occupation, or income, to own socio-economic position in adult life. Little is known about the consequences of individuals’ own assessment of changes in socio-economic position for health outcomes. In this study, we examine the association of social mobility and health in a unique sample of the Russian population after the transition to a market society. We take a broad perspective on social mobility, putting emphasis on subjectively perceived social mobility. Results show that individuals’ objective characteristics only partially explain the variation in their subjective perceptions of intergenerational mobility. Net of social origin and destination variables, subjective social mobility is associated with individuals’ health outcomes, as measured by the 12-Item Short Form Health Survey. Those who perceive being upwardly mobile report better health, and downward mobility is associated with poorer health. The association holds for mental and physical health, for perceived downward and upward social mobility, and for a general subjective measure of mobility and a subjective measure prompting respondents to only think of mobility in terms of occupation. These findings are robust to controlling for a rich set of socio-demographic predictors on childhood adversity, contemporaneous material wellbeing, and family-related circumstances. We conclude that a conventional focus on single socio-economic status dimensions such as occupation might be too narrow to capture the health consequences of social mobility.

Objectives Intergenerational educational mobility can be particularly relevant for smoking because it implies moving from individuals' family background to a new position in the social hierarchy. Existing research, however, does not provide an answer as to how the process of mobility, per se, is associated with the likelihood of smoking. Study design We used cross-nationally comparable survey data for 20 countries collected within the health module of the European Social Survey in 2014. The analytical sample consisted of 22,336 respondents aged 25–64 years. Methods Smoking was operationalized by daily and occasional smoking, while the intergenerational educational mobility variable was derived from a comparison of respondents' and their parents' highest levels of educational attainment. We employed diagonal reference models to examine the association of intergenerational educational mobility and smoking. Results In the country- and age-adjusted analysis, intergenerational downward mobility was associated with odds ratios of 1.34 (CI95 1.07, 1.68) and 1.61 (CI95 1.34, 1.93) for smoking, respectively, among men and women. Intergenerational upward mobility, on the other hand, was negatively associated with smoking but only among women. Conclusion Our findings provide new evidence that the process of intergenerational educational mobility is associated with individuals' likelihood of smoking and that this effect cannot be explained by conventional covariates of smoking.

Any systematic errors in self-reported height, a measure commonly used in health research, may produce biased BMI estimates and reduce the effectiveness of public health interventions. To our knowledge, none of the studies evaluating the validity of self-reported height explore this issue in cross-national settings. This study analyses data on a sub-set of 750 individuals with information on self-reported and measured height from the Life in Transition Survey (LITS) conducted in 34 European and Central Asian countries in 2016. We make use of the unique design of LITS in which all respondents reported their height, but in one randomly selected primary sampling unit in each country the actual height was also measured, using a portable stadiometer. In addition to analysing individual-level characteristics, using a multiply imputed dataset for missing data and multilevel mixed-effects regressions, we test if macro-level factors are associated with respondents under- or over-reporting their height. We find that on the aggregate level self-reported and measured height estimates are not statistically different, but some socio-demographic groups such as women and those who live in rural areas are likely to overestimate their height. Adjusting for this bias would lead to the higher estimates of the proportion of individuals who are overweight and obese. The results from multilevel analysis also show that macro-level factors do not per se explain the likelihood of misreporting height, but rather some of the effects of individual characteristics are moderated by income inequality.

Background The association between socio-economic position and health is believed to be mediated, in part, by psycho-social comparison of one’s situation with that of others. But with whom? Possibilities include family, friends, elites, or even those in other countries or in previous times. So far, there has been almost no research on whether the reference point matters. Methods We take advantage of a comparative data set that, uniquely, allows us to ask this question. The Life in Transition Survey was conducted in four Southern European and 30 Central and Eastern European and Eurasian countries. We sought differences in the probability of good self-reported health among those using different reference groups, including own family, friends and neighbours, domestic elites, people living in other countries and those living prior to a major politico-economic transition. We used multivariable and multilevel mixed-effects Poisson regressions and estimated treatment effects via the regression adjustment of Poisson models. Results In most cases the choice of reference group did not matter but in some it did. Among men in Eastern European and Eurasian societies, those who compared themselves with their parents and their own families before the start of transition were less likely to report good health compared with those who did not compare their own economic situation with any specific reference group. Conclusions For some individuals, the choice of who to compare one’s situation with does seem to matter, pointing to an area for future investigation in research on psycho-social determinants of health.

Recently there has been a renewed focus on analyzing post-communist memory, including the revitalization of debate on contemporary public perceptions of Josef Stalin. How do Russians and Georgians judge Stalin in the post-Soviet present? What individual characteristics are the best indicators of how someone evaluates Stalin? Scholars have offered various insights into the apparent resurgence of appreciation for the late Soviet leader, including nostalgia for the Soviet period, socio-spatial variables, and political attitudes, but no comparative research on attitudes and their explanations has been attempted. Using nationally representative survey data, this study compares the perceptions of Stalin in contemporary Russia and contrasts it with how people view the Soviet dictator in Georgia, his home country. We conclude that Stalin is alive in the minds of many, both in Georgia and Russia, although for different reasons. If in Georgia the admiration of Stalin is largely explained by socio-demographic and socio-spatial variables, in Russia it is more closely related to ideological and political context.

Research on intergenerational social mobility and health-related behaviours yields mixed findings. Depending on the direction of mobility and the type of mechanisms involved, we can expect positive or negative association between intergenerational mobility and health-related behaviours. Using data from a retrospective cohort study, conducted in more than 100 towns across Belarus, Hungary and Russia, we fit multilevel mixed-effects Poisson regressions with two measures of health-related behaviours: binge drinking and smoking. The main explanatory variable, intergenerational educational mobility is operationalised in terms of relative intergenerational educational trajectories based on the prevalence of specified qualifications in parental and offspring generations. In each country the associations between intergenerational educational mobility, binge drinking and smoking was examined with incidence rate ratios and predicted probabilities, using multiply imputed dataset for missing data and controlling for important confounders of health-related behaviours. We find that intergenerational mobility in relative educational attainment has varying association with binge drinking and smoking and the strength and direction of these effects depend on the country of analysis, the mode of mobility, the gender of respondents and the type of health-related behaviour. Along with accumulation and Falling from Grace hypotheses of the consequences of intergenerational mobility, our findings suggest that upward educational mobility in certain instances might be linked to improved health-related behaviours.

Individuals do not possess an entirely accurate assessment of the level of income differences in their society and so changes in quantitative measures of income inequality may not always align with changes in the perceptions of income inequality. This disconnect is partly driven by how people form their opinions about the level of inequality. In this study we explore whether there is an association between perceptions of inequality and health, and if so, how it differs depending on the specific channel through which people formed their opinions about changes in income inequality. Drawing on data from 31 European and Eurasian countries, we find that both men and women are more likely to report bad health when their perceptions of increasing inequality are formed through experiences of inequality in their communities than through media and other channels.

With this study, we make a number of contributions to the ongoing debate on the implications of intergenerational mobility for individuals' health. First, instead of focusing on absolute intergenerational mobility in educational attainment, we analyse varying implications of relative intergenerational mobility for depressive symptoms by considering the distribution of educational credentials separately in the parental and offspring generations. Second, unlike conventional approaches, which predominantly emphasise that upward and downward mobility has a negative effect, we argue that upward mobility might improve individuals' mental well-being and that this effect may vary by gender. Third, we use statistical approach which was designed specifically to study the consequences of intergenerational mobility and does not conflate mobility effects with effects of the positions of origin and destination. Using the 2012–2014 waves of the European Social Survey and data for 52,773 individuals nested in 28 societies, we fit the diagonal reference models with both individuals' short- and long-range experiences of intergenerational educational mobility. The results indicate that upward and downward mobility is associated with, respectively, lower and higher levels of depressive symptoms, as measured with the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, and that these effects are only observed among men.

Human anthropometric traits, while significantly determined by genetic factors, are also affected by an individual’s early life environment. An adult’s body height is a valid indicator of their living conditions in childhood. Parental education has been shown to be one of the key covariates of individuals’ health and height, both in childhood and adulthood. Parental functional literacy has been demonstrated to be another important determinant of child health, but this has largely been overlooked in studies on height. The objective of this study was to analyse the associations between parents’ education, their functional literacy and their children’s adult body height. The study used data for 39,240 individuals from the 2016 wave of the nationally representative Life in Transition Survey (LITS) conducted in 34 countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Using linear and Poisson models, regression adjustment treatment estimators and multilevel mixed-effects linear regressions, the study analysed the links between mother’s and father’s educational attainment, parental functional literacy, measured by the number of books in the childhood home, and children’s adult height. The models also included other individual and contextual covariates of height. The results demonstrated that mother’s educational attainment and parental functional literacy have independent associations with children’s adult body height. Sufficient literacy skills of the parent may have a positive effect on children’s growth even if parental education is low. These associations remained significant across time. The study also provides evidence of a widening of the height gap for men born in the period just before and after systemic transition in post-socialist societies, which may suggest an increase in social differences in early living standards.

Quality of self-reported data on individuals’ height has implications for social epidemiology and public health. Height along with weight is used to calculate individuals’ body mass index (BMI). Since the large share of data on height in demographic and health surveys are based on individuals’ declarations, any systemic errors in this measure may produce biased BMI estimates and reduce the effectiveness of anti-obesity interventions and public health campaigns.

Background A large proportion of premature deaths in Russia since the early 1990s, following the transition from communism, have been attributed to hazardous drinking. Little is known about the correlates of alcohol consumption. We present new data on the consumption of alcoholic beverages among middle-aged and older Russians and identify socio-demographic, socio-economic, and life-course correlates of frequent drinking. Methods Within the framework of the PrivMort project, conducted in 30 industrial towns in the European part of Russia, we acquired information on the frequency of drinking among 22,796 respondents and 57,907 of their surviving and deceased relatives. We fit three-level mixed-effects logistic regression models of frequent drinking in which respondents’ relatives, aged 40 and over, are nested in their families and towns. Results Deceased male relatives consumed alcohol significantly more often, while deceased female relatives consumed alcohol significantly less often than the respondents of corresponding gender. In a multivariable analysis, we found that individuals’ education, communication with family members, labour market status, history of unemployment, and occupational attainment are all significant correlates of frequent drinking in Russia. These associations are stronger among men rather than among women. Conclusion There are significant differences between frequency of drinking among surviving and deceased individuals and frequent drinking is associated with a wide array of individual socio-demographic, socio-economic, and life course factors that can partially explain high alcohol consumption in post-communist Russia.

Objectives The very high rates of smoking among men and the rapid changes among women in the Post-Soviet countries mean that this region offers an opportunity to understand better the intergenerational role of parental influences on smoking. Methods In this study, we exploit a unique data set, the PrivMort cohort study conducted in 30 Russian and 20 Belarusian towns in 2014–2015, which collects information on behaviours of middle-aged and older individuals and their parents, including smoking. We explored the associations between smoking by parents and their offspring using multiply imputed data sets and multilevel mixed-effect Poisson regressions. Results Adjusting for a wide array of social origin, socio-demographic, and socio-economic variables, our analysis suggests that sons of regularly smoking fathers have prevalence ratios of 1.35 [95% confidence intervals (CI) 1.21–1.50] and 1.39 (CI 1.23–1.58) of smoking, while the figures for daughters of regularly smoking mothers are 1.91 (CI 1.40–2.61) and 2.30 (CI 1.61–3.28), respectively, in Russia and Belarus. Conclusions Intergenerational paternal and maternal influences on smoking should be taken into account in studies seeking to monitor the rates of smoking and the impact of tobacco control programmes.

The article uses mixed methods to explore the politics of memory surrounding the Stalin monument in Gori, Georgia, which was removed by the government in 2010. We employ bivariate and multivariate statistics to analyze people’s preferences in Georgia concerning the monument’s fate using socio-demographic, socio-economic, spatial, and political variables, identifying six factors as offering explanatory power: gender, age, place, socialization, education, and attitudes toward Vladimir Putin. We identify three main narratives in the qualitative data analysis: the desire to continue displaying the monument somewhere; the futility of monument battles; and the appeal to democratic principles in deciding these cases.

Regime change experienced in post-communist societies is of great significance for research in social stratification and mobility. Nonetheless, the existing literature does not provide a clear answer if cross-national differences in social mobility are determined by communist legacies or by the divergent paths these countries followed in their transition to the capitalist system. It is hypothesised that higher income inequality and an overall decline in material wellbeing would increase the importance of parental economic capital, whereas the relative role of parental cultural capital in offspring’s life chances would decline. For 24 societies in Central and Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, I find evidence on the decisive role of social origins, particularly parental education, in predicting individuals’ educational and occupational attainment. However, significant and systematic changes in intergenerational social mobility from pre- to post-transitional cohorts are not observed. The derived findings are robust to alternative specifications of social origins and destinations. Arguably, differences in intergenerational links between parents’ and offspring’s socio-economic status resulted from historical discrepancies in the communist period rather than the consequences of idiosyncratic developments in post-communist transition.

Since 2016, Georgia has been categorized as an upper middle-income economy by the World Bank. "e latter corresponds to the trends from the various micro-level data sets, which suggest that the middle class has been expanding in the recent years. However, what can be referred to as ‘the middle class’ in the Georgian context is still largely in the making, and this process remains vulnerable to endemic problems such as high inequality, low urbanization, agricultural underdevelopment, and the existence of rather large, vulnerable social groups. Political stability, geopolitics and international economic shocks all play a role in the prospects of the middle class in Georgia.

Building on the previously investigated macro-sociological models which analyze the consequences of economic development, income inequality, and international migration on social mobility, this article studies the specific contextual covariates of intergenerational reproduction of occupational status in post-communist societies. It is theorized that social mobility is higher in societies with democratic political regimes and less liberalized economies. The outlined hypotheses are tested by using micro- and macro-level datasets for 21 post-communist societies which are fitted into multilevel mixed-effects linear regressions. The derived findings suggest that factors specific to transition societies, conventional macro-level variables, and the legacy of the Soviet Union explain variation in intergenerational social mobility, but the results vary depending which birth cohorts survey participants belong to and whether or not they stem from advantaged or disadvantaged social origins. These findings are robust to various alternative data, sample, and method specifications.

Background Population-level data suggest that economic disruptions in the early 1990s increased working-age male mortality in post-Soviet countries. This study uses individual-level data, using an indirect estimation method, to test the hypothesis that fast privatisation increased mortality in Russia. Methods In this retrospective cohort study, we surveyed surviving relatives of individuals who lived through the post-communist transition to retrieve demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of their parents, siblings, and male partners. The survey was done within the framework of the European Research Council (ERC) project PrivMort (The Impact of Privatization on the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe). We surveyed relatives in 20 mono-industrial towns in the European part of Russia (ie, the landmass to the west of the Urals). We compared ten fast-privatised and ten slow-privatised towns selected using propensity score matching. In the selected towns, population surveys were done in which respondents provided information about vital status, sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics and health-related behaviours of their parents, two eldest siblings (if eligible), and first husbands or long-term partners. We calculated indirect age-standardised mortality rates in fast and slow privatised towns and then, in multivariate analyses, calculated Poisson proportional incidence rate ratios to estimate the effect of rapid privatisation on all-cause mortality risk. Findings Between November, 2014, and March, 2015, 21 494 households were identified in 20 towns. Overall, 13 932 valid interviews were done (with information collected for 38 339 relatives [21 634 men and 16 705 women]). Fast privatisation was strongly associated with higher working-age male mortality rates both between 1992 and 1998 (age-standardised mortality ratio in men aged 20–69 years in fast vs slow privatised towns: 1·13, SMR 0·83, 95% CI 0·77–0·88 vs 0·73, 0·69–0·77, respectively) and from 1999 to 2006 (1·15, 0·91, 0·86–0·97 vs 0·79, 0·75–0·84). After adjusting for age, marital status, material deprivation history, smoking, drinking and socioeconomic status, working-age men in fast-privatised towns experienced 13% higher mortality than in slow-privatised towns (95% CI 1–26). Interpretation The rapid pace of privatisation was a significant factor in the marked increase in working-age male mortality in post-Soviet Russia. By providing compelling evidence in support of the health benefits of a slower pace of privatisation, this study can assist policy makers in making informed decisions about the speed and scope of government interventions.

In this article we pursue, using appropriate British birth cohort data, various issues that arise from recent research into the ‘direct’ effect of social origins on individuals’ social mobility chances: i.e. the effect that is not mediated by education and that can be seen as giving rise to non-meritocratic ‘glass floors’ and ‘glass ceilings’. We show that if educational level is determined at labour market entry, class destinations are significantly associated with class origins independently of education. However, we go on to investigate how far the direct effect may be underestimated by an insufficiently comprehensive treatment of social origins, and also how far it may be overestimated by a failure to take into account the effects of later-life education and resulting changes in individuals’ relative qualification levels. Finally, having arrived at our best estimates of the extent of the direct effect, we seek to identify factors that mediate it. While individuals’ cognitive ability and sense of locus of control prove to play some part, reported parental help in the labour market does not appear to be of any great importance. Some implications of our findings both for further research and for the ideal of an education-based meritocracy are considered.

The politics of memory plays an important role in the ways certain figures are evaluated and remembered, as they can be rehabilitated or vilified, or both, as these processes are contested. We explore these issues using a transition society, Georgia, as a case study. Who are the heroes and villains in Georgian collective memory? What factors influence who is seen as a hero or a villain and why? How do these selections correlate with Georgian national identity? We attempt to answer these research questions using a newly generated data set of contemporary Georgian perspectives on recent history. Our survey results show that according to a representative sample of the Georgian population, the main heroes from the beginning of the twentieth century include Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Ilia Chavchavadze, and Patriarch Ilia II. Eduard Shevardnadze, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and Vladimir Putin represent the main villains, and those that appear on both lists are Mikheil Saakashvili and Joseph Stalin. We highlight two clusters of attitudes that are indicative of how people think about Georgian national identity, mirroring civic and ethnic conceptions of nationalism. How Georgians understand national identity impacts not only who they choose as heroes or villains, but also whether they provide an answer at all.

This article explores the consequences of intergenerational social mobility on perceptions of popular explanations of poverty. It is hypothesised that those who experience improvements in socio-economic status through social mobility are more likely to blame poverty on individual characteristics such as laziness and lack of willpower and are less likely to attribute failure to injustice in society, and on the macro-level, the effect of social mobility on perceptions of popular explanations of poverty is moderated by contextual environment. The described hypotheses are tested by using multinomial and multilevel logistic regressions and two complementary datasets—European Values Studies and the Life in Transition Survey. The derived findings suggest that social mobility is indeed associated with perceptions of individual blame and social blame of why some people are in need. However, these effects are manifested primarily among subjectively mobile individuals and are also conditioned by the legacy of socialism and the level of economic development of countries where individuals reside.

This article explores the association between intergenerational social mobility and attitudes towards income differences in post-socialist societies. I hypothesise that based on the psychological mechanism of self-serving bias in causal attribution, those who experience upward social mobility are more likely to support greater income differences, and that subjective intergenerational mobility has stronger association with attitudes towards income differences than objective mobility because individuals filter their objective environment in order to derive their subjective perceptions of the world and their own experiences. The described hypotheses are tested with two cross-national data sets – European Values Studies and Life in Transition Survey. The derived findings are robust to alternative statistical specifications and indicate that individuals who perceive themselves as subjectively mobile have significantly different attitudes towards income differences in comparison to non-mobile groups, but that this effect does not manifest among objectively mobile individuals.

In recent years, as part of the broader policies of economic liberalization, the sale of agricultural land to foreign citizens has attracted considerable political, social and media attention in transition societies. The regime of land ownership in Georgia has evolved from the complete restriction of foreign acquisition in the beginning of the 1990s, to the unrestricted sale of land to foreign citizens from 2010 onwards. An analysis of newly-available data from International Social Survey Programme’s (ISSP) National Identity module suggests that respondents in Georgia, along with Russia, hold the most negative attitudes toward selling land to foreigners compared to other countries. I hypothesize that this is the result of a confluence of factors such as the communist legacy, historical memory, rural nationalism, agricultural underdevelopment and inequality. The quantitative part of this article tests socio-demographic, geographic, ideological, and identity-based explanations of within-country variation in attitudes toward the purchase of land by foreigners. The results suggest that socio-demographic and geographic variables such as respondents’ age and regional belonging explain some variance in the dependent variable, but that the major effects stem from individuals’ perceptions of economic protectionism, xenophobia, and ethnic national identity.

Abstract In this article we explore the spatial variation of support for former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in his home country, Georgia. This research contributes to the literature on reputational politics by highlighting the role of spatial, rather than only social, factors in the construction of public opinion about Stalin. We illustrate how geographic factors impact Georgians' perceptions of the Soviet dictator by examining various aspects of place at various scales—including distance to Gori, Stalin's birthplace, the history of urbanization, and economic and political indices. To this end we map attitudes toward the Soviet dictator and use a multilevel spatial regression technique to explain variance in support for Stalin across forty-seven districts of Georgia. This enables us to explore the impact of place on people's attitudes by examining (1) whether there are local and regional hotspots of Stalin admiration and, if so, (2) what the contextual explanations of these attitudes are.

Background Previous research using routine data identified rapid mass privatisation as an important driver of mortality crisis following the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. However, existing studies on the mortality crisis relying on individual level or routine data cannot assess both distal (societal) and proximal (individual) causes of mortality simultaneously. The aim of the PrivMort Project is to overcome these limitations and to investigate the role of societal factors (particularly rapid mass privatisation) and individual-level factors (e.g. alcohol consumption) in the mortality changes in post-communist countries. Methods The PrivMort conducts large-sample surveys in Russia, Belarus and Hungary. The approach is unique in comparing towns that have undergone rapid privatisation of their key industrial enterprises with those that experienced more gradual forms of privatisation, employing a multi-level retrospective cohort design that combines data on the industrial characteristics of the towns, socio-economic descriptions of the communities, settlement-level data, individual socio-economic characteristics, and individuals’ health behaviour. It then incorporates data on mortality of different types of relatives of survey respondents, employing a retrospective demographic approach, which enables linkage of historical patterns of mortality to exposures, based on experiences of family members. By May 2016, 63,073 respondents provided information on themselves and 205,607 relatives, of whom 102,971 had died. The settlement-level dataset contains information on 539 settlements and 12,082 enterprises in these settlements in Russia, 96 settlements and 271 enterprises in Belarus, and 52 settlement and 148 enterprises in Hungary. Discussion In addition to reinforcing existing evidence linking smoking, hazardous drinking and unemployment to mortality, the PrivMort dataset will investigate the variation in transition experiences for individual respondents and their families across settlements characterized by differing contextual factors, including industrial characteristics, simultaneously providing information about how excess mortality is distributed across settlements with various privatization strategies.

One of the most important components of post-socialist transition has been economic liberalization. This article inquiries into how the latter is associated with intergenerational mobility in occupational status. Using European Values Studies (evs) data from the nationally representative samples for a large number of post-socialist societies, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (ebrd) index of economic liberalization, and multilevel mixed-effects linear regressions, I test the “meritocracy as functional imperative” perspective which implies that life chances depend on the efficiency considerations of liberalized economy. The derived results are robust to alternative model and variable specifications and suggest that economic liberalization explains cross-national differences in intergenerational status reproduction, and is better suited for macro-sociological models of mobility in occupational status than other conventional contextual explanations such as economic development and income inequality.

This article studies public welfare preferences in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Generalised ordered logistic regression models and predicted probabilities are employed to analyse comparable attitudinal survey data. The results vary considerably among the countries, but age is the most important covariate of welfare preferences, followed by individuals’ socio-economic characteristics. The findings also indicate that popular perceptions of transition, notably in Ukraine and Moldova, are most strongly linked to preferences concerning the state's involvement in reducing the gap between the rich and the poor rather than to preferences regarding the main welfare state programmes such as pensions and healthcare.

Recently, there has been a renewed focus on analyzing post-Soviet memory, including the rekindling of debate on contemporary perspectives of Josef Stalin. Most notably, the publication of The Stalin Puzzle has helped bring attention to the persistence of positive accounts and admiration, along with ambivalent and contested images, of the former dictator of the Soviet Union. Using survey data and multivariate statistical methods, we test five broad hypotheses – socialization, structural, ideological, nationalist, and gender – to ascertain what factors might shape people's attitudes toward Stalin in Georgia. Our analysis reveals that elderly, poor men from rural areas have the most positive associations of Stalin, whereas young, wealthier women from cities, those who are open to privatization, and perceive Russia as Georgia's biggest threat judge Stalin negatively. Counterintuitively, non-Georgian minorities show higher esteem for Stalin than Georgians. We envision that the effects of cohort replacement, economic development, and urbanization will decrease positive perceptions of Stalin in years to come.

This article explores the impact of spatial location – place – on people's attitudes by examining whether support for Stalin is concentrated in his birthplace: Gori, Georgia. Using a variety of multivariate statistical methods, including propensity score-matching, we examine a recent survey indicating high levels of admiration for Stalin in his home country. We explore two main questions: First, is there a “hometown effect” – do people in Gori love Stalin unconditionally because they came from the same place? Second, is Gori so exceptional from the rest of Georgia? We conclude that there is indeed a stronger level of support for Stalin in Gori, but when shifting scales and looking within the category, we find that the highest admiration stems from the town's rural outskirts.

reappeared. These battles, both symbolic and material, over monuments fuel and exemplify contemporary "memory wars." This article highlights the disparate meanings of three historical Stalin monuments that served as focal points for three major cases of mass demonstrations during Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign: Tbilisi, Budapest, and Prague. Next, drawing on newly found materials from Tbilisi's Central Committee Archive of the Communist Party of Georgia, this article discusses Bogdan Muradovich Kirakosian's never-realized project to build a massive Stalin monument that would have overlooked Tbilisi. Last is the analysis of survey data that captures individuals' attitudes towards Stalin for those born in Georgia before 1945 in order to surmise how such a grand monument to Stalin would have been received at the time.

Although old-age benefits help to alleviate poverty in Georgia, the system does not satisfy its main stakeholders. Retirees believe that pensions are unfair and inadequate, while experts and governmental officials realize the growing burden of benefits for the country’s public finances. The past experience of pension (non) reforms suggest that changes are sensitive to the government’s capacity to reform, the fiscal health of the economy, political stability and the ideological preferences of the ruling elites. The transfer of power through parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012–2013 opened an opportunity for reforming the pension system based on broad public consensus and economic sustainability.

Something amazing happened in Georgia’s 1 October 2012 parliamentary elections. The government lost and it gave up power, aside from the now-weakened presidency that it will hold for another year. A new coalition known as Georgian Dream ran under the leadership of Georgia’s richest man, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, and won 85 seats in the unicameral, 150-member Parliament. Georgia’s post-Soviet background and circumstances make the 2012 opposition win and subsequent orderly handover of power truly remarkable. Indeed, among the “competitive authoritarian” regimes found in what used to be the USSR, it is nearly unheard of. Georgia is lucky to be getting a fourth chance at democracy, after the opportunities under Zviad Gamsakhurdia (1990–92), Eduard Shevardnadze (1992–2003), and Saakashvili faded. But this chance remains a fragile one.

Using data from the Generations and Gender Survey for the cohorts born from 1926 to 1985 in Georgia, and the linear probability models of higher educational and ISCO 1-2 occupational attainment, I find the large ascriptive inequalities of life chances, which especially intensified for those born in 1976-85. Having parents with the lower socio-economic status negatively and significantly associates with life prospects. Although tertiary education serves mainly as the mediator of social origin, the latter also exerts a direct effect on the occupational attainment. One of the reasons why the inequalities in life chances have increased in recent decades is the growing gap between educational expansion and occupational upgrade and the resultant inflation of credentials.

Over the last two decades, the profile of the poor has been evolving in Georgia, but the poverty level has remained consistently high. If the official subsistence minimum is taken as the poverty line, slightly more than two-fifths of the population is poor according to the latest estimations. Arguably, persisting high poverty levels can be explained by jobless economic growth and low agricultural productivity. The institutionalisation of a targeted social assistance scheme has yet to demonstrate its efficacy. Instead of using perverse estimates of relative poverty, the government should acknowledge deprivation as the major challenge for the country and must more eagerly attempt to cure it root causes—inappropriate human capital and narrow labour markets.

The Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative is a European Union (EU) project aiming to advance socioeconomic development in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. To date, virtually no research has been done on comparative welfare systems in these countries. This paper aims to narrow this gap. It is argued here that the comparative welfare state approach for the Central and Eastern European and Baltic Post-Communist countries is not appropriate for the selected region, since weak democratic institutions and economic underperformance contradict the primary foundations of the welfare state. The paper instead considers a welfare regime paradigm developed for less advanced nations. The empirical part of the study is based on the hierarchical and kmeans clustering method to analyse different welfare outcome and welfare effort indicators and on binomial logistic regression technique to analyse public attitudes towards welfare. The results of the study indicate that the welfare outcomes in EaP countries can be clustered into three distinct groups, but that using conventional welfare state variables, such as the total government outlay on welfare programmes, and welfare attitudes cannot explain the systematic determinants of varying welfare performance among the countries. It appears that employing the welfare regime framework, which more vividly takes into account the domestic and international activities of state, market and household, can increase the robustness of welfare research of the strategies employed by EaP countries to address their social risks. Nevertheless, the problems with data availability and reliability might restrict the comparative research framework to only a few specific social welfare dimensions.

The paper examines the factors that played a major role in development of the old-age pension system in Georgia. Based on data collected from 1991-2009, this analysis centers on the system’s patterns of development and identifies four main attempts to reform the old-age pension system. Economic performance, demographic aging, domestic political constellations, and external influence are traditionally thought to be responsible for the pension system reforms. Qualitative data analyses and in-depth interviews have been used to test these explanations. This analysis did not confirm the hypotheses, but it revealed that fiscal constraints and international technical assistance were the main factors behind reforms during the first two chronological attempts to change the system. Political factors and liberal economic ideology influenced the patterns of old-age pension policy development from 2004–2008, while the negative outcomes of the Russian-Georgian War and World Financial Crisis are currently the major obstacles for comprehensive pension reforms. The limitations of this study suggest that in order to clarify the exact nature of old-age pension system, shorter time periods and separate reform initiatives should be investigated.

This study reviews the factors that played a major role in the development of the old-age pension system in Georgia, 1991-2009 and identifies three main stages in this process. Fiscal constraints and international technical assistance were the main factors behind reform initiatives undertaken before 2003 and during the first attempts to change the system. Political factors and liberal economic ideology influenced the patterns of pension policy development in the period 2004–2008, while the negative economic outcomes surrounding the Russian-Georgian War and Global Financial Crisis, along with decreasing political legitimacy, are thought to be major obstacles for comprehensive pension reform at present. The main lesson drawn by this study concerning the post 2012–2013 election-cycle pension initiatives is that decisive steps should be taken based on hard evidence, rather than ideological conviction.