ABSTRACT The coronavirus pandemic, which first impacted European societies in early 2020, has created a twofold crisis by combining a health threat with economic turmoil. While the crisis has affected all European societies very significantly, its impact varies across countries, social groups, and societal domains. In an effort to provide a first overview of the effect of the coronavirus crisis, in this editorial we discuss contributions of 58 papers published as part of this special issue. These early research papers illustrate the varied impact of the pandemic on various areas of social life. The first group of studies in this special issue analyzes the effect of the pandemic on social inequalities with respect to gender, ethnic otherness, education, and work. A second stream of research focuses on the psychological consequences of the pandemic, especially with respect to wellbeing and resilience. Thirdly, the crisis is discussed on a societal level, in regard to welfare states, social policies, and approaches to crisis governance. In a fourth line of inquiry, several studies have analyzed the impact of the pandemic on social solidarity and cohesion. A fifth strand of research is devoted to examining the role of culture and lifestyles. This review ends with a discussion of areas for future research trajectories.

ABSTRACT Current literature on the economic determinants of prejudice focuses on how relative deprivation might lead to bias by focusing on group perceptions, with little or no attention given to individual-level deprivation. We address this gap in literature by examining how relative and objective individual-level hardship affects generalised prejudice and suggest that both forms of deprivation lead to increase in a wide variety of out-group biases. We test our hypotheses with data from an original cross-national survey conducted in 2015 in nine European countries (N∼18,000) by applying multilevel models. We include macro-level measures of economic context, including measures of unemployment levels and GDP growth. We make a novel contribution to the growing literature on prejudice in European societies: our results are surprising and suggest that individuals experiencing deteriorating living standards are less likely to express generalised prejudice. We suggest that these findings can be explained using political psychology literature: recent studies suggest that low self-esteem increases altruistic behaviour and reduces the level of out-group bias. These findings open new avenues of research and suggest a new way of theorising the relationship between economic deprivation and prejudice.

ABSTRACT Analysing data from an original cross-national survey conducted in 2015 in nine European democracies covering five different types of welfare regime and asking individuals a variety of questions on their deprivation during the crisis, this paper shows that there are important cross-national and cross-class inequalities in deprivation as reported by individuals in different social classes. Cross-nationally, deprivation patterns reflected the welfare regimes of the nine countries as well as the severity of the economic crisis. Working class individuals in countries that were not so deeply affected by the crisis were generally found to be worse off than middle class individuals in countries that were more deeply affected. Semi/unskilled manual classes were found to be the most deprived and class differentials were diminished but not accounted for in multilevel models including a series of controls linked to risk factors and socio-demographic position. At the macro-level, higher inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient was associated with higher levels of reported deprivation. However, cross-level interaction tests did not provide evidence that being in semi/unskilled manual occupations has a further heightened effect on reported deprivation in contexts of higher inequality or lower social spending.