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(2024): Dealing with Clashes of International Law : A Microlevel Study of Climate and Trade International Studies Quarterly. Oxford University Press (OUP). 2024, 68(4), sqae136. ISSN 0020-8833. eISSN 1468-2478. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1093/isq/sqae136
For years, scholars in international relations have addressed questions related to regime complexity and its effects. However, there is a lack of understanding of how individuals react to clashes of international law obligations when assessing domestic policies. In this article, we study the extent to which citizens are concerned with compliance and noncompliance with international law when their governments design domestic laws to implement international obligations. We are, in particular, interested in whether citizens’ reactions to clashes of international obligations are driven by concerns about being exposed internationally for breaching international law or concerns about tangible material costs. Our empirical analysis is based on an experiment embedded in a survey of Swiss citizens’ attitudes toward environmental issues. The experiment first shows that individuals react to both information about compliance as well as noncompliance, whereas the shifts are more notable in the case of negative information about noncompliance. Second, we find that information about the country being subject to international adjudication (what we call exposure costs) in case of noncompliance is more consequential than information about material costs (facing retaliation).
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(2024): Digitalization and the green transition : Different challenges, same policy responses? Regulation & Governance. Wiley. ISSN 1748-5983. eISSN 1748-5991. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1111/rego.12624
How do citizens perceive labor market risks related to digitalization and the green transition, and how do these risk perceptions translate into preferences for social policies? We address these questions in this paper by studying the policy preferences of individual workers on how governments should deal with the two labor market challenges of digitalization and the green transition. Employing novel cross-country comparative survey data including a vignette experiment for six advanced postindustrial economies, we probe to what extent the different labor market challenges are associated with differences in preferences, distinguishing between support for social investment policies on the one hand and compensatory policies on the other. A first finding is that even though individuals perceive different levels of labor market risk due to the green transition and digitalization, their preferences for social policy responses do not differ systematically across the two risks. Instead, we find that social policy preferences are affected by individual-level and, to some extent, country-level contextual factors. Confirming previous work, higher perceived labor market risk is associated with more support for compensatory policies but less support for social investment.
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(2024): Party positions and the changing gender gap(s) in voting European Union Politics. Sage. 2024, 25(3), S. 504-526. ISSN 1465-1165. eISSN 1741-2757. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1177/14651165241257785
Why, despite increased female support, do social democratic parties (SDPs) in most Western European countries face electoral decline? To study this puzzle, we harness a well-documented regularity: diminishing support for SDPs by manual workers and their increased support for the far right. We contend that this trend is intensified in contexts where the economic positions of SDPs align with market-oriented policies or converge with those of the far right. Additionally, as men are disproportionately represented among manual workers, this shift contributes to the reversal of the gender gap in support for SDPs. Drawing on public opinion data from 18 countries spanning half a century, along with labor and party economic position data, our findings substantiate this argument.
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(2024): All on board? The role of institutional design for public support for differentiated integration European Union Politics. Sage. 2024, 25(3), S. 593-604. ISSN 1465-1165. eISSN 1741-2757. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1177/14651165241246384
Differentiated integration is often considered a solution to gridlock in the European Union. However, questions remain concerning its perceived legitimacy among the public. While research shows that most citizens are not, in principle, opposed to differentiated integration – although support varies across different differentiated integration models and different country contexts – we still know little about the role institutional design plays in citizens’ evaluations of differentiated integration. This article inspects how citizens evaluate different hypothetical differentiated integration arrangements, with varying decision-making procedures, using a conjoint experiment. We ask whether institutional arrangements can overcome citizens’ preference heterogeneity over differentiated integration, and thereby foster the legitimacy of a differentiated European Union. We find that while a majority of citizens care about the inclusiveness of differentiated integration arrangements, they also support limiting the number of veto points. Our analysis also reveals noteworthy differences across citizens with pro- and anti-European Union attitudes in the perceived fairness of differentiated integration arrangements.
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(2024): Discrimination or a Competitive Climate? : Why Women Cannot Translate Their Better High School Grades into University Grades Research in Higher Education. Springer. ISSN 0361-0365. eISSN 1573-188X. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1007/s11162-024-09815-5
While girls have better grades than boys in high school, this does not translate into better performance of young women, as compared to young men, in university. Due to the high signalling value of university grades for subsequent income and employment outcomes, this has important consequences for gender inequalities at labour market entry. However, previous studies have not yet examined the potential barriers that might limit women’s ability to maintain their previous academic achievement at the university level. Drawing on the nation-wide Student Survey, this study addresses this shortcoming by investigating perceived discrimination against women and perceived competition among students as two potential correlates. Our findings first confirm that while girls have better grades in high school than boys, this has reversed at the university level. Further, high school grades are less strongly correlated with university grades for girls compared to boys. Our results highlight that young women perceive there to be more discrimination against women as well as higher levels of competition within their field of study, than do their male peers. The study further demonstrates that an increased level of perceived discrimination is strongly associated with lower university performance for young women, thereby plausibly hindering their ability to reach their full academic potential.
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(2024): When do Women Take the Lead? : Exploring the Intersection Between Gender Equality and Women’s Environmental Political Participation from a Comparative Perspective International Journal of Sociology. Taylor & Francis. ISSN 0020-7659. eISSN 1557-9336. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1080/00207659.2024.2384310
Research has long claimed that women engage less than men in environmental political participation (EPP) (protests, petitions), despite having higher levels of environmental concern and vulnerability. Using the ISSP’s 2020 Environment Module including 28 countries, we argue that higher gender equality and socio-economic development can allow women to voice environmental grievances. Using multi-level models, we examine the effects of gender equality on gender differences in protests, petitions, and boycotts. Offering a more encompassing approach, we distinguish individual from collective, and non-confrontational from confrontational engagement forms. We find that women actually participate more than men, but mainly in individual and non-confrontational EPP forms (petitions, boycotts), and with substantial cross-country variation. Moreover, considering women’s historical barriers from participating in politics, we argue that structural gender inequality remains an important limitation to women’s engagement. Cross-level interactions indicate that especially when in more egalitarian countries, women take the lead in several types of EPP.
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(2024): How Education Policies Shape Political Inequality : Analyzing Policy Feedback Effects in Germany Comparative Political Studies. Sage. ISSN 0010-4140. eISSN 1552-3829. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1177/00104140241269876
Education is one of the strongest predictors of political participation at the individual level. However, the association between education and participation varies across countries, which previous studies attribute mainly to institutions like electoral systems. Drawing on policy feedback and political socialization theories, we suggest an alternative explanation: education policies generate powerful and lasting policy feedback effects in adolescence, which continue to influence patterns of participation among adults. More concretely, we argue that policies aimed at de-stratifying secondary education (i.e., promoting more comprehensive models of education) are associated with a decrease in political inequality. We empirically investigate our argument in Germany, where education policies vary across sub-national units (Länder) and over time. We leverage this variation by combining data on Land-level policies with data on individual’s participation. Our results show that de-stratifying education policies have reduced in inequality in various forms of political participation, interest, and efficacy, but not in turnout.
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(2024): On the mushrooming reports of “quiet quitting” : Employees’ lifetime psilocybin use predicts their overtime hours worked Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. Taylor & Francis. 2024, 56(4), S. 475-484. ISSN 0279-1072. eISSN 2159-9777. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1080/02791072.2023.2242358
Despite the recent and sharp rise in psychedelic research, few studies have investigated how classic psychedelic use relates to employees’ work-related outcomes. This is surprising given that the increased use, decriminalization, and legalization of classic psychedelics in the United States (U.S.) has the potential to impact both employees and their organizations. Addressing this gap, the current study explores how employees’ lifetime psilocybin use relates to the amount of overtime they work, thereby offering insight into what current trends in psilocybin use could mean for businesses. Using pooled, cross-sectional data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2002–2014) on 217,963 adults employed in the U.S. full-time, this study tests whether lifetime psilocybin use is associated with employees’ number of overtime hours worked in the past week. After adjusting for sociodemographics and other substance use, a significant negative association is found between employees’ lifetime psilocybin use and the amount of overtime they reported working. Specifically, the findings suggest that lifetime psilocybin use in the U.S. full-time working population is associated with an estimated 44,348,400 fewer overtime hours worked per year and may help explain recent findings linking employees’ lifetime psilocybin use to a reduction in sick leave taken.
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(2024): Undermining lobbying coalitions : the interest group politics of EU copyright reform Journal of European Public Policy. Taylor & Francis. 2024, 31(8), S. 2287-2315. ISSN 1350-1763. eISSN 1466-4429. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1080/13501763.2023.2249948
Recent studies show that, when salience is high, ‘heterogeneous lobbying coalitions’ uniting business and civil society groups are more successful in achieving their lobbying objectives than homogeneous coalitions. It is therefore surprising that a coalition of tech firms and civil society activists failed to prevent the adoption of the EU’s contested 2019 Copyright Directive, which constitutes a significant shift in the Union’s approach to online content regulation. This article argues that proponents of the policy change successfully undermined the lobbying coalition by invoking notions of ‘digital sovereignty’ and by delegitimizing activists as Silicon Valley’s ‘useful idiots’. Combining process-tracing of the lobbying processes and content analysis of European Parliament debates, the article shows how legislators employed delegitimation and sovereignty claims to justify their non-responsiveness to public protests. The article contributes to the interest group literature and debates on ‘digital sovereignty’ by demonstrating its strategic use in the policy-making process.
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(2024): Drivers of Political Participation : The Role of Partisanship, Identity, and Incentives in Mobilizing Zambian Citizens Comparative Political Studies. Sage. 2024, 57(9), S. 1441-1474. ISSN 0010-4140. eISSN 1552-3829. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1177/00104140231194064
Scholars and policymakers widely view identity as a key driver of African citizens’ political engagement. In doing so, however, they have emphasized ethnicity and largely sidelined other identities, including gender, local origin, shared residency, and partisanship. In this paper, we explore which identities drive political engagement and why they do so. We employ an original survey experiment that includes various identities and other incentives that may drive citizens’ participation around Zambia’s 2021 national elections. We find that partisanship most influences individuals’ stated willingness to campaign for a candidate or meet with an MP, while ethnicity and social incentives play less significant roles. Finally, we explore the mechanisms underpinning these results and find that citizens anticipate sanctions if they fail to support a co-partisan but not a co-ethnic candidate. These findings have important implications for understanding political engagement and democratic development throughout the region.
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(2024): Neighborly social pressure and collective action : Evidence from a field experiment in Tunisia PLOS ONE. Public Library of Science (PLoS). 2024, 19(7), e0304269. eISSN 1932-6203. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0304269
Research on political participation almost unanimously assumes that social pressure by neighbors induces collective behavior. Yet most experimental studies focus on individually based forms of political and civic behavior, such as voting and recycling, in Western industrialized societies. The paper tests the effect of neighborly social pressure on collective action in Tunisia. In a field experiment, I manipulate whether neighbors or community outsiders invite citizens to contribute to a public good (i.e., trash collection). I run the experiment in three neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic composition in Tunis (n = 1199). I do not find evidence to suggest that neighborly social pressure encourages participation in neighborhood cleanups, with low participation rates both for the neighbor and outsider contact conditions. While the effect of social pressure does not significantly vary across communities, overall participation rates do. Residents of the poor neighborhood are most likely to respond in a socially desirable way when asked about their intentions but least likely to participate. The paper also discusses some limitations of the study and outlines avenues for future research.
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(2024): Who are the immigrants that Israeli Jews prefer? : The interplay between reasons for migration, religion, and religiosity Comparative Migration Studies. Springer. 2024, 12, 32. ISSN 2214-8590. eISSN 2214-594X. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1186/s40878-024-00387-y
This study focuses on the impact of three attributes of migrants – their reasons for migration, religion, and level of religiosity – on public support for allowing migrants to come and live in Israel. We rely on a factorial survey that was conducted in a representative sample of the Israeli Jewish population analyzing the assessments of 600 respondents of various vignettes (N = 3,595) of hypothetical migrants about admitting them to the country. The findings reveal that Israeli Jews do not evaluate all immigrant groups equally. Preferences for specific groups of migrants are primarily structured along two main attributes: religion and reasons for migration. The result is a hierarchical distinction between immigrants of Jewish ancestry and those who are non-Jewish. Jewish repatriates are perceived as “deserving migrants” who can make legitimate claims about belonging to the host society. As such, they enjoy an ethno-religious premium based on ancestral rights. By contrast, there is less support for the entry of non-Jewish migrants, whether asylum seekers or labor migrants, as their presence is viewed as a threat to the Jewish character of the state and the hegemony of the Jewish majority. The impact of the immigrants’ attributes on attitudes varies based on the level of religiosity of the Jewish population, especially in the case of non-Jewish migrants. Support is stronger in the case of secular respondents and much weaker among their more religious counterparts. The findings are discussed in light of existing theories.
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(2024): Richness, Insecurity and the Welfare State Journal of Social Policy. Cambridge University Press. 2024, 53(3), S. 573-594. ISSN 0047-2794. eISSN 1469-7823. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1017/S0047279422000617
Across many countries, increases in inequality driven by rising top incomes and wealth have not been accompanied by growing popular concern. In fact, citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. Understanding how the general public perceive richness is an essential step towards resolving this paradox. We discuss findings from focus group research in London, UK, a profoundly and visibly unequal city, which sought to explore public perceptions of richness and the rich. Participants from diverse socio-economic backgrounds discussed their views of the ‘wealthy’ and the ‘super rich’ with reference to both vast economic resources and more intangible aspects, including, crucially, security. High levels of wealth and income were perceived to be necessary for achieving security for oneself and one’s family. The security of the rich was discussed in contrast to participants’ own and others’ insecurity in the context of a (neo)liberal welfare regime – specifically, insecurity about housing, personal finances, social security, health care and the future of the welfare state. In unequal countries, where insecurity is widespread, lack of confidence in collective welfare state provision may serve in the public imagination to legitimate private wealth accumulation and richness as a form of self-protection.
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(2024): Does LSD confer lasting psychological resilience? : an investigation of naturalistic users experiencing job loss PLOS ONE. Public Library of Science (PLoS). 2024, 19(6), e0304991. eISSN 1932-6203. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0304991
Recent studies on classic psychedelics have suggested that their use is associated with psychological strengths and resilience, thereby conferring users a type of psychological protection relative to non-users. However, this idea has been brought into question by recent findings suggesting that lifetime users of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) report worse mental health during stressful experiences. The current study addresses these mixed findings by examining whether LSD use prior to a stressful experience buffers against the psychological distress experienced in the wake of the stressful experience. This study draws on openly-available data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2008–2019) on 5,067,553 (weighted) unemployed, job seeking individuals experiencing job loss. Using purposeful respondent exclusion criteria to establish temporal precedence of the variables under investigation, this study offers a straightforward test of whether LSD use confers psychological resilience to naturalistic users. LSD use prior to job loss was associated with a higher likelihood of severe psychological distress following job loss, regardless of whether sociodemographic variables were controlled for or not. In sum, this study fails to find evidence for LSD-conferred psychological resilience in naturalistic users in the wake of a stressful experience.
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(2024): Representativeness and face-ism : Gender bias in image search New Media and Society. Sage. 2024, 26(6), S. 3541-3567. ISSN 1461-4448. eISSN 1461-7315. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1177/14614448221100699
Implicit and explicit gender biases in media representations of individuals have long existed. Women are less likely to be represented in gender-neutral media content (representation bias), and their face-to-body ratio in images is often lower (face-ism bias). In this article, we look at representativeness and face-ism in search engine image results. We systematically queried four search engines (Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex) from three locations, using two browsers and in two waves, with gender-neutral (person, intelligent person) and gendered (woman, intelligent woman, man, intelligent man) terminology, accessing the top 100 image results. We employed automatic identification for the individual’s gender expression (female/male) and the calculation of the face-to-body ratio of individuals depicted. We find that, as in other forms of media, search engine images perpetuate biases to the detriment of women, confirming the existence of the representation and face-ism biases. In-depth algorithmic debiasing with a specific focus on gender bias is overdue.
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(2024): Working more for more and working more for less : Labor supply in the gain and loss domains Labour Economics. Elsevier. 2024, 88, 102533. ISSN 0927-5371. eISSN 1879-1034. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102533
We examine labor supply responses to piece rate changes relative to the reference piece rate (RR). In experimental conditions without RR, labor supply increases monotonically with the actual piece rate. In conditions with RR, labor supply increases both when the piece rate rises and falls relative to RR. This non-monotonicity in labor supply responses to piece rate changes around RR is consistent with the effects of framing a given level of income as gain or loss relative to the target level induced by RR: loss aversion makes subjects work more at a given piece rate when the implied income is in the loss rather than gain domain. However, the framing effects disappear when the piece rate could both rise or fall relative to RR.
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(2024): The quality of government conditions political disagreement over redistributive policies Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. Taylor & Francis. ISSN 1745-7289. eISSN 1745-7297. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1080/17457289.2024.2352451
This study argues that the quality of government structures the divide of public opinion on redistribution within countries. Countries with higher government quality have both the capacity and impartiality required to implement effective and fair redistribution. In effect, material self-interest and fairness-based evaluations should become better predictors of policy preferences in countries with higher government quality. An empirical analysis of survey data from 40 institutionally diverse countries supports this theory. Interaction regression models show that the government quality moderates the effects of income and unfairness perceptions on redistribution preferences. Both preference drivers are more strongly associated with redistribution support in countries with higher government quality. Preferences thereby become more heterogeneous in higher-quality settings. The results offer micro-level support for the theory that government quality structures politics and policies via the public opinion channel. To the extent that public opinion influences political behavior and policymaking, higher government quality should induce a stronger economic left-right divide over these political phenomena.
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(2024): The politics of distributing blame and credit : Evidence from a survey experiment with Norwegian local politicians European Journal of Political Research. Wiley. 2024, 63(2), S. 599-620. ISSN 0304-4130. eISSN 1475-6765. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12610
How do politicians attribute responsibility for good and poor policy outcomes across multiple stakeholders in a policy field where they themselves can affect service provision? Such ‘diffusion’ decisions are crucial to understand the political calculations underlying the allocation of blame and credit by office-holders. We study this issue using a between-subjects survey experiment fielded among local politicians in Norway (N = 1073). We find that local politicians attribute responsibility for outcomes in primary education predominantly to school personnel (regardless of whether performance is good or bad) and do not engage in local party-political blame games. However, we show that local politicians are keen to attribute responsibility for poor outcomes to higher levels of government, especially when these are unaligned with the party of the respondent. These findings suggest that vertical partisan blame-shifting prevails over horizontal partisan blame games in settings with a political consensus culture.
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(2024): Institutional Design and Biases in Evaluation Reports by International Organizations Public Administration Review. Wiley. 2024, 84(3), S. 560-573. ISSN 0033-3352. eISSN 1540-6210. Verfügbar unter: doi: 10.1111/puar.13705
Governments spend hundreds of millions on evaluations to assess the performance of public organizations. In this article, we scrutinize whether variation in the institutional design of evaluation systems leads to biases in evaluation findings. Biases may emerge because influence over evaluation processes could enable the bureaucracy to present its work in a more positive way. We study evaluation reports published by nine international organizations (IOs) of the United Nations system. We employ deep learning to measure the share of positive assessments at the sentence level per evaluation report as a proxy for the positivity of evaluation results. Analyzing 1082 evaluation reports, we find that reports commissioned by operative units, as compared to central evaluation units, systematically contain more positive assessments. Theoretically, this link between institutional design choices and evaluation outcomes may explain why policy-makers perceive similar tools for evidence-based policy making as functional in some organizations, and politicized in others.
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