The present collection of articles is based on data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and analyses the changes in European societies. The first part of the volume is devoted to relations between legitimization, subjective well-being, voting patterns, and the role of social cohesion in determination of political culture. The second part addresses methodological questions designed to quantify the reliability and validity of certain measures in interviews, coverage errors, measurement errors, and non-response, as well as the understanding of questions in multi-country surveys in the context of the comparability between countries.

This book aims to provide empirical evidence regarding the consequences of changes in European societies, focussing on migration and related phenomena of discrimination and xenophobia. The comparative analyses cover all countries of the European Social Survey in the period 2002-2014. They reveal that native members of so-called vulnerable groups, such as the unemployed, retired, permanently sick or disabled and the elderly, were more likely to experience threats and to exhibit anti-immigration attitudes. The contributors further examine social openness defined in terms of marital homogamy, social trust in the context of legitimization and social conditions of sleeplessness. A final methodological section presents the results of a mixed mode experiment involving the face-to-face mode.