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A General Discontent Disentangled: A Conceptual and Empirical Framework for Societal Unease

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Abstract

Surveys show discontent with society to be prevalent among the general public across western societies. However, this undercurrent, here called societal unease, has received little scientific attention. This article has four aims. First, it proposes a conceptual model of societal unease by integrating a broad range of interdisciplinary literature. Second, it tests this conceptual model empirically with survey data from the Netherlands. Confirmatory factor analyses confirm a latent dimension of societal unease behind attitudes about five aspects of society. Third, it shows societal unease to be highly related to societal pessimism, moderately to anomia and weakly to happiness. Finally, it explores the association of societal unease with various demographic, attitudinal and behavior characteristics.

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Notes

  1. This literature study has seen several stages. I started by summarizing the arguments in the literature in short statements. I then classified these claims into coherent categories, called elements of societal unease. The final model resulted from several rounds of reviewing these categories, and incorporating additional literature.

  2. Its dimensions reflect evaluations of one’s relationship, contribution and understanding of society (social integration, social contribution, social coherence) and on the other hand the perceptions of human nature and progress of society (social acceptance and social actualization).

  3. The other two reactions are to still adhere to the culturally prescribed means, with or without adhering to the goals.

  4. Srole’s scale of anomia has been very influential (Srole 1956), and inspired many similar scales [see Seeman’s overview (1991)]. These scales tend to be very broad, measuring, psychological wellbeing and are a mix of questions about locus of control, general unhappiness and efficacy. Most contemporary research on anomia can be divided in measuring either inclination to question rule of law and showing illegal or criminal behavior (Burkatzki 2008; Zhao and Cao 2010) or a general uncertainty, confusion or lack of comprehensibility (Thorlindsson and Bernburg 2004; Legge et al. 2008; Bjarnason 2009).

  5. World Economic Outlook database URL: www.imf.org.

  6. This ranking is based on life expectancy, literacy rate, educational level and standard of living. URL: hdr.undp.org/en/humandev/.

  7. URL: worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/index.html.

  8. Another item which is very similar to indicators used for social actualization “for most people, life is getting worse” is not included, because this hints to socioeconomic decline, and here the goal is to measure societal pessimism as broad and undirected as possible.

  9. This scale reduction is of importance because the 1 category often represents only a very small percentage of the respondents, and cannot be analysed as such. Merging category 1 and 2 is therefore necessary. To secure symmetry, also categories 4 and 5 are merged.

  10. There are two modification indices above 10, namely 10,5 and 11,4, but as these are theoretically meaningless and low (Byrne 2012: 87), this also indicates a good model.

  11. As societal pessimism is measured with two items, it is not an identified factor on itself and therefore the loadings cannot be examined without correlation to another indicator. In the model with societal unease, the loadings of the two items are similar (“future of the world” 0.662 and “direction country” 0.769).

  12. If the indicator “for most people life is getting worse” (see footnote 7) is added to the factor of societal pessimism, the correlation still reaches 0.90. This means that indeed, this indicator is less broad, and probably taps more in a socioeconomic side of societal pessimism than the other two items, but as 0.9 is still very high, this would not change the conclusion regarding hypothesis 2.

  13. Age, gender and income level are shown as the original categories in Table 7 and therefore not included in Appendix Table 8.

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  1. Department of Political Science, The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) | University of Amsterdam (UvA), Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Eefje H. Steenvoorden

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Correspondence to Eefje H. Steenvoorden.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 8 Description of independent variables in Table 7
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Steenvoorden, E.H. A General Discontent Disentangled: A Conceptual and Empirical Framework for Societal Unease. Soc Indic Res 124, 85–110 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0786-4

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