The political and economic crises of the recent decades as well as the new changes brought on by globalization and digitalization have contributed to exacerbate social inequalities and injustice and revealed different social realities in Europe. The EU increasingly deals with social issues in its cultural and heritage policy. In this article, we explore the construction of this social dimension and advance the concept of 'social Europe' by exploring its cultural aspect based on our analysis of a recent EU heritage action, the European Heritage Label. In this action, the narrations of the European past and the attempts to foster common cultural heritage in Europe function as building blocks to create Europe as an intertwined cultural and social entity and to socialize a new generation of European citizens. We scrutinize the European Heritage Label and its notion of heritage from two perspectives. First, we analyse how the selection reports of these heritage sites construct a notion of social Europe. Second, we examine how visitors to these sites construct social Europe in their qualitative interviews. Key elements in this construction are narratives related to various values, mobility, and diversity.

School teachers' sickness absence has been shown to affect student achievement in the short run. However, we know little about whether socioeconomic backgrounds may compensate for reductions in instructional quality and to what extent teacher absence effects persist over time. This paper examines the socioeconomic differences in the short- and long-term effects of teacher absence. We use population-wide Norwegian register data to study the effects of certified teacher absence during lower secondary school (grades 8-10) on non-completion of upper secondary education by age 21 (i.e. school dropout) as well as academic achievement in 10th grade. In a school fixed effects model, we find that an increase in teacher absence of 5 percentage points reduces students' examination grades by 2.3% of a standard deviation and increases the dropout probability by 0.6 percentage points. However, the teacher absence effects vary considerably by family background, with large effects for low-SES students driving the overall effects. Overall, our findings indicate that reductions in instructional quality increase social inequality in long-term educational outcomes. This result highlights that studying heterogeneous impacts of contextual exposures is needed to understand the role of schools in shaping inequality.

The timing of parental unemployment can impact children's educational transitions. Previous research has mostly examined transitions to higher education, proxying timing in relation to children's age and often focusing on selective populations. We study unemployment's intergenerational effects at multiple stages of the educational career, and define timing relative to important crossroads within and across school years for a broader population of children. Further, we build on suggestive patterns in prior studies and test if and how parental unemployment's effects vary depending on the availability, level, and combination of private insurance (parental wealth) and public insurance (unemployment benefits). We rely on Dutch administrative data on cohorts of students born between 1992 and 1998 and observed around the time of the Great Recession. With a negative-control design, we find that paternal unemployment in 6th grade decreases children's chances of enrolling in the general and academic secondary-school tracks, but only in families with lower wealth. Effects are moderate and partly flow from lower performance in a high-stakes test in 6th grade. These effects are reduced when households receive larger unemployment benefit amounts, particularly above median values. In addition, paternal unemployment in 6th grade has long-term negative effects on postsecondary enrolment for children with lower relative wealth. Differently, we do not find evidence of timing effects for spells of paternal unemployment occurring around high-school graduation, nor when examining the timing of maternal unemployment. These findings can inform remedial interventions aimed at mitigating the negative effects of disruptive events on children's education.

Prior research has examined the relationship between ethnic outgroup-size at the neighbourhood level and Brexit support, yet there is a lack of understanding on the factors that moderate these effects. This paper critically extends prior debate by focusing on how personality traits moderate not only the extent to which the levels (2011) of ethnic outgroup-size in individuals' residential neighbourhoods but also the increase thereof (2001-2011) are associated with individuals' preferences about the 2016 Brexit referendum. Using data from Understanding Society, we find that two personality traits, agreeableness and openness, are key moderators affecting the above-mentioned relationship. High-agreeable and high-open individuals are less likely than low-agreeable and low-open individuals to support Brexit. However, while the gap between low and highly agreeable individuals shrinks as ethnic outgroup-size increases, the gap widens between those higher vs. lower in openness. Our findings highlight the multifaceted role of personality traits as a driver of heterogeneous effects on political behaviour. In sum, this paper shows that analysing the complex and intertwined nature of both contextual and individual factors is fundamental for a better understanding, not only of the Brexit referendum but, more broadly, of anti-immigrant sentiment.