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.

The PAWCER (Public Attitudes to Welfare, Climate Change and Energy in the EU and Russia) project followed the aim to conduct comparative on public attitudes to welfare, climate change and energy, all of which are relevant to understanding conflict, identity, and memory. Cross-national analyses of survey and contextual data were used to examine discrepancies and similarities, as well as diverging and converging trends between public attitudes to these topics. This research was at first instance based on data from rotating modules of the European Social Survey (ESS) (Round 8/2016). Russians have relatively high levels of energy security worries, particularly when it comes to the affordability of energy, and providing a reliable, uninterrupted flow of energy without technical failures. In turn, fossil fuel dependency is not considered a particularly problematic issue, and both fossil and nuclear energy are, compared to most of the other European countries, highly preferred. Russians have one of the weakest climate beliefs and concern in the ESS data, and the public perceives rather little personal responsibility to try to reduce climate change. When it comes to support for climate policy measures, subsidies on renewables and banning the least energy efficient appliances are somewhat supported, but still less than in other countries. Generally Russian climate perceptions can be considered rather weak compared to many of the other countries studied. Regarding welfare attitudes findings point to the direction that Russian respondents are strongly in favor of welfare systems that benefit the entire population, such as a proposed universal basic income or old-age pensions, but are considerably less supportive of programs aimed at specific groups of people in need, such as the unemployed, working parents and migrants. Eastern Europeans and Russians are amongst the most reserved about the social rights of immigrants, with at least 40% of respondents thinking migrants should never be given the same social benefits as native born citizens or only be granted to them after becoming citizens. Furthermore, in Eastern Europe and Russia people's perceptions of the living standards of the unemployed are low, but this does not necessarily lead to support for increasing benefits for those who are currently out of work. The data also indicates that people in the Nordic countries are quite confident that social benefits will lead to more equality, whereas people in the Eastern European countries are at the other end of the scale. Only 24.4% of Russians think that social benefits and services will lead to more equality - the lowest of any country. Furthermore, people tend to place more restrictions on benefits where welfare systems are deemed to be less effective: mainly Eastern European countries and Russia.