Over the last two decades, European countries have struggled with several crises (e.g., the Great Recession, the refugee crisis) which had a tremendous impact on (some) societies. Typically, these crises were accompanied by divisive public discourses that rely heavily on a sharp and moralistic us-them distinction. Especially extreme right- and left-wing parties have adopted such conflict discourses and have gained much electoral support. Against this background, this paper has two objectives. First, data from the European Quality of Life Survey from 2003 to 2016 in 27 countries are used to provide a comprehensive overview of the salience of perceived societal conflicts between seven pairs of groups between countries and across time. We find substantial differences between countries and longitudinal trend variation in the salience of perceived societal conflict. For example, in Eastern European countries more economic conflict is perceived, while in Western European countries people perceive more cultural conflict between different ethnic and religious groups. Second, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses reveal that specific perceptions of conflict are structured by an underlying general orientation, generalized conflict thinking: people’s tendency to perceive society through the lens of conflict regardless of the specificity of these groups. The measure for generalized conflict thinking is metric equivalent across a large sample of countries. This demonstrates that generalized conflict thinking can be used as a social indicator for comparative research. In the conclusion we elaborate on the implications of our findings and develop a research agenda regarding generalized conflict thinking.

在过去的二十年中，欧洲国家经历了数次危机（例如大萧条，难民危机），这些危机对（某些）社会产生了巨大影响。通常，在这些危机中伴随着分裂的公众话语，这些话语在很大程度上取决于我们与他们之间尖锐和道德的区分。特别是极端的左翼和右翼政党已经采用了这种冲突话语，并获得了很多选举支持。在这种背景下，本文有两个目标。首先，使用2003年至2016年欧洲27个国家/地区的生活质量调查数据，全面了解了国家之间以及跨时间的七对群体之间感知到的社会冲突的严重性。我们发现国家之间的实质性差异和社会冲突显着性的纵向趋势变化。例如，在东欧国家，人们看到了更多的经济冲突，而在西欧国家，人们则看到了不同种族和宗教群体之间更多的文化冲突。其次，多组验证性因素分析表明，对冲突的特定感知由潜在的一般性取向即广义冲突思想构成：人们倾向于通过冲突的视角来感知社会，而与这些群体的特殊性无关。广义冲突思维的衡量标准在许多国家中都是等效的。这表明广义冲突思维可以用作比较研究的社会指标。