Perceived And Desired Images Of Society: How (Un)Equal Is Society?

In the contemporary world, it is very important to understand how people see and perceive our societies themselves. The main research objective of this article is to study imagined – perceived and desired – types of society using comparative analysis. The target group is composed of the 23 countries which participated in social inequality studies of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in 2009 and 2019. Among the questions to answer in this study are: What is the gap between the assessment of perceived and desired types of society? How are the perceived images of society related to different macro socioeconomic and political conditions? How are individual assessments influenced by sociodemographic and attitudinal characteristics? The shortage of studies on topics relating to these questions justifies the importance of this article. A novelty of this study is not only in the cross-national comparison of images of society, but also in the linking of this concept to human and social capital, well-being, and subjective identities. The research results show that contemporary societies are perceived as socially unequal in most countries; however, the majority of populations still expect to live in more just societies in future.