Suchergebnisse

In recent years a substantial part of literature that covers topics on European integration has turned its attention to how the membership of the European Union (EU) has generated and contributed to domestic reform, a process commonly known as Europeanisation. This process represents the reform of institutions, structures and policies in compliance with the requirements, policies and dynamics of the European integration mechanisms. Following the national - European interaction, countries internalise European legislation and adapt institutionally. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the Europeanisation process and also to what extent it has influenced the political and economic reform in Romania throughout the pre-accession period. Despite its essential contributions, the Europeanisation effects were less significant in Romania (especially in the early years of negotiations with Brussels) compared with other Eastern European countries. And this has not been caused by the Europeanisation lack of efficiency, but mainly because of the Romanian political class reluctant to change that largely undermined the dynamics of the accession process.

The social psychological literature on social change has focused on how groups overcome oppression and inequality. In this paper, we investigate an alternative strategy that groups employ for social change—the emulation of successful outgroups. We propose that lower status group members will be likely to employ a learning strategy when they perceive the status relations as legitimate (i.e., fair system) and unstable (i.e., own position is improvable). In Study 1 (Romanian undergraduate students, N = 31), we manipulated status legitimacy, while in Study 2 (British undergraduate participants, N = 94), we manipulated legitimacy and stability orthogonally. Overall, when they perceived status hierarchies as legitimate and unstable, participants exhibited higher admiration for the higher status outgroup, higher support for learning-related help (e.g., transfer of know-how, training) from the outgroup and had the most positive attitudes toward intergroup help. We propose that social change sometimes occurs gradually, through help and learning from successful models, and this paper offers insight into such gradual social change.

Drawing upon a social identity approach, three studies focus on the elicitors of intergroup admiration by investigating the relationship between admiration for an outgroup and this outgroup's prototypicality for a superordinate category. In Study 1 ( N = 314), we find empirical support for a positive association between prototypicality and admiration in cross-national survey data. In Study 2 ( N = 52), we provide experimental evidence for the relationship between admiration and prototypicality by manipulating different facets of prototypicality: admiration for an outgroup occurs only when the group is perceived as prototypical in relation to the ideal of the superordinate category, but not in relation to the category average. Study 3 further explores the importance of prototypicality for a superordinate category. We present an analysis of online comments to news articles ( N = 477) referring to positive regard of outgroups and highlight the role of prototypicality in these discussions. Overall, we contribute to research on admiration by showing that the elicitation of admiration is dependent on the social identities involved, providing an identity-situated analysis of this positive group-based emotion.