Profiles of Social Inequality in Eastern and Central European countries

Social inequality is a phenomenon which exists in every society. The analysis of social inequality is often based on different theories of stratification, emphasizing different aspect of social inequality. However, researches of social inequality are related not only to measurement of the actual inequality, but also to the public opinion - how members of the society perceive and interpret processes of the society. Both individual and macro-level factors influencing public opinion are analyzed in this doctoral dissertation. The aim of the doctoral dissertation is to assess how Eastern and Central Europeans perceive social inequality. The object - public opinion about social inequality in Central and Eastern European countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. The research reveals that the assessment of the national context is closely connected with the estimation of social inequality in the researched countries: the better the overall assessment of the country context, the less visible existing social inequality. Based on the assessment of possibilities in life, differences in attitudes towards social inequality were found in East and Central European countries: besides the ascriptivistic attitude existing in all researched countries, the functionalistic approach is dominating in Estonia, Lithuania and Czech Republic; nepotistic - in Latvia, and mixed social origin – nepotistic dimension – in Poland and Hungary