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Health inequalities in Europe are often examined using unidimensional socioeconomic variables, which can mask heterogeneity within minoritized populations. This study applies Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) to examine how minority group, gender, age, and education jointly pattern self-rated health among migrants and native-born ethnic minorities in 28 European Union countries.We included 22,611 participants from the European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (EU-MIDIS II, 2016). The sample comprised immigrants from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Turkey, and other parts of Asia; recent migrants; and two native-born minority groups (Roma and individuals of Russian background). We analyzed 64 strata defined by minority groups, age, gender, and education, with country random intercepts. Using multilevel logistic and linear models for self-rated health, we quantified general contextual effects (VPC), specific contextual effects, and discriminatory accuracy (AUC).The results reveal a multidimensional social gradient in self-rated health. Roma and individuals of Russian background reported the poorest health outcomes, while Asian and recent migrant groups had comparatively favourable profiles. A substantial portion of the total variability in self-rated health is structured by intersectional strata, indicating that health inequity among minoritized groups in Europe is not reducible to the independent contribution of each social dimension but reflects the convergence of ethnicity, sex, age, and socioeconomic position.These results show substantial heterogeneity within and between minoritized groups in Europe. Effective public health responses require intersectional policy frameworks that move beyond single-axis approaches to address the structural drivers of health inequity.

Trots att många sökande till juristutbildningen sorteras bort och att juristutbildningen är vägen till mångabetydelsefulla positioner i samhället, vet vi mycket lite om hur väl urvalssystemet för utbildningen fungerar. Attutvärdera antagningssystemet har blivit tilltagande angeläget om den ökade förekomsten av så kallade glädjebetyginneburit att kopplingen mellan gymnasiebetyg och förmåga att lyckas med högre studier sjunkit, vilket somliga påstår.I denna artikel analyserar vi empiriskt sambandet mellan gymnasiebetyg och studieresultat på juristutbildningensamt i vad mån antagningssystemet kan förbättras. Vi finner inga bevis för att gymnasiebetygens prediktiva effekt påstudieframgång på juristutbildningen har sjunkit sedan 2015. Vi finner dock att en sammanvägning av gymnasiebetygoch högskoleprovsresultat skulle resultera i ett mer träffsäkert antagningssystem.

Although many applicants to the law program are filtered out and the law program serves as a pathway to manyinfluential positions in society, we know very little about how well the selection system for the program functions.Evaluating the admissions system has become increasingly important if, as some have argued, the growing prevalenceof so-called grade inflation has weakened the link between secondary school grades and the ability to succeed inhigher education. In this article, we empirically analyze the relationship between secondary school grades andacademic performance in the law program, as well as the extent to which the admissions system could be improved.We find no evidence that the predictive power of secondary school grades for success in the law program has declinedsince 2015. However, we do find that a combined weighting of secondary school grades and university entrance examresults would result in a more accurate admissions system.

With the rise of explosive violence in urban Sweden, gang-related crime has become a dominant theme in Swedish media and political discourse. As individual members of prominent criminal networks gain increasing media attention, the construction of the gang myth—how gangs and their members are represented, circulated, and re-imagined—becomes a crucial area of inquiry. This article investigates the ways in which crime content moves through the hybrid news cycle, shaping public perceptions of gangs and their leaders. Using topic modeling of news articles (n = 521) and multimodal critical discourse analysis of TikTok posts (n = 73) referencing one of the most well-known gang leader in contemporary Sweden, the Kurdish Fox, we examine how myth-building operates across different media contexts. Our findings reveal a stark contrast in narrative strategies: while news media frame gangs through urgency, fear, and political crisis, TikTok users engage in playful, dissident humor—employing memes, emojis, and remix culture to subvert dominant crime discourses.

This article analyses the health effects of discrimination experiences across several minority groups in Europe. Despite a broad literature advancing the idea that discrimination is a focal point for the social determinants of health among minority groups, research attempting to disentangle the health effects of interpersonal forms of discrimination and harassment from structural forms of discrimination is underexamined. Furthermore, these experiences may impact different minority groups to a greater or lesser extent due to that group's position in the social hierarchy. We address this gap in the literature by analysing the Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (EU-MIDIS II), including 19,179 respondents in six minority groups across 25 countries. We show that experiencing interpersonal discrimination and harassment has a large and consistent negative effect on the health of respondents across all groups, with some variation across different minority groups. This finding is concerning given how common these experiences are in the European context. We also show a small but consistent relationship across groups between living in segregated neighbourhoods and poorer health, whereas a negative relationship between health and living in overcrowded housing exists only for the Russian minority.

After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Sweden changed its historic position of non-alignment and applied for membership in the NATO military alliance. This decision coincided with a shift in public opinion in favor of NATO membership, in what has been described as the largest and fastest shift in public opinion that has ever been measured in Swedish history. We examine two aspects of this “rally around the flag effect” to explain this change, the effect of the crisis event itself and the effect of political elite influence by analyzing within-individual changes of a Swedish university student population at three different time points. We find that after the Russian invasion but before the decision was made to join NATO, public opinion was still split with roughly 40% still opposed. However, after the decision was made to apply for membership to the alliance many people changed their position (32%), either making up their minds or switching position entirely. We show that these changes were likely in response to the decision to join, and that they were moderated by individuals’ previously established political preferences.

In this article, we analyse the level of and development in students’ academic stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We devote particular attention to students that first entered university in 2020, ‘the COVID cohort’, who had fewer opportunities to integrate in ways that theoretically should mitigate the impact of pandemic-induced disruption to their studies. Using four waves of data, collected 2020–2022, we find evidence of both pandemic and cohort effects among Swedish university students (N = 3138). During the pandemic’s first year academic stress due to COVID-19 increased regardless of pre-pandemic university experience. The stress, in turn, negatively impacted students’ life satisfaction, a factor theoretically linked to key student outcomes like persistence and academic performance but had limited effect on students’ long-term optimism. The COVID cohort expressed higher levels of academic stress and experienced a greater drop in life satisfaction compared to the most senior students (3 years or more), but largely overlapped with students with some university experience (1–2 years). These group differences persisted in spring 2022. Finally, we found that the higher levels of pandemic-induced academic stress in the COVID cohort were mitigated by experiences that foster academic and social integration, specifically by teacher support and social cohesion.

In many European countries the Roma are the largest minority group, and research often highlights their heightened exposure to discrimination, harassment, and even abuse during interactions with the state, and the majority group. In contrast, many governments have assistance programs targeted to the Roma in an effort to boost integration. However, there is strikingly little systematic quantitative research on how these experiences are related to the trust that the Roma place in political institutions. This study addresses this gap by using EU-MIDISII data from 9 European countries (Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain) to assess the relationship between institutional trust and the experiences the Roma have with the police and assistance programs. Our analyses show that different experiences relate to trust in institutions differently: interactions with the police, either by being stopped or assaulted are most strongly associated with lower trust in the police but also reduce trust across institutions. In contrast, local governments have the most to gain from those who report having received assistance based on their minority membership, with other institutions receiving modest trust benefits. Finally, both overall personal experiences of discrimination and the perceived extent of discrimination in their country are associated with low levels of trust in the institutions. These results are consistent across the countries includedin the analysis, and highlight the specific importance of institutional assistance and procedural justice in fostering or eroding trust amongst minority populations, and at the same time, the relevance of reducing the extent of discrimination against minorities.

The relationship between police and ethnic minorities has been the subject ofincreasing interest in many Western societies in recent years. We examine firstgeneration immigrants’ trust in the police in Europe from a comparative andlongitudinal perspective. Based on roughly 20,000 immigrants observed in 22countries over 13 years in the European Social Survey, results show thatinitially high levels of trust in the police among immigrants tend to erodewith the length of their stay in the host country. We show that twosimultaneous processes drive this pattern: a fading reference effect(downward assimilation) and an increasing discrimination effect. Crossnational comparisons show that, on average, immigrants in countries withmore police trust the police less. However, there is no effect of police sizewithin countries, mostly because police numbers hardly change over time.We discuss implications for future research and policy development based onour findings.

How does structural racism influence where people are killed during encounters with police? We analyzed geo-located incidents of fatal encounters with police that occurred between 2000 and 2020 in Census tracts that received a classification by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the 1930's. Statistical models show that incidents of fatal encounters with police in formerly redlined areas are 66% more likely than in zones that received the most favorable “A” rating. These differences remain even when tract historical and contemporary racial compositions, along with contemporary economic conditions, are taken into account. The effects of contemporary racial composition and economic conditions overshadow the effect of zone classifications only in areas with high proportions of Black residents or residents in poverty (>60% or >30% respectively). These findings provide evidence of structural biases in policing rooted in historical segregation policies.