Archive Detail

Speaker:
Dr. Nadja Wehl

Dr. Nadja Wehl is presenting her working paper titled "Material Shocks, Economic Risk, and Economic Policy Attitudes. A Life-Course Perspective". 

Abstract: 

How do people react politically when they experience a material shock? The literature discusses three possibilities. First, stronger preferences for policies that alleviate the economic consequences of the economic shock. Second, more negative attitudes towards migrants. And third, a greater distance from politics. Yet, all three possibilities have to address the big elephant in the room first. Are these really direct consequences or merely confounded correlations?

With a shift towards better causal identification in the study of the political effects of economic shocks the literature can be summarized into studies that do find direct causal effects of economic shocks and those that do not. The first type of studies typically concludes that the effects are due to some form of self-interest or resource-based mechanism. The second type of studies typically concludes that null-effects are due to the long-lasting effects of early political socialization during the impressionable years.

This paper contributes to this debate in theoretical and empirical terms. In theoretical terms, the paper situates arguments about reactions to economic shocks, economic risks, and economic disadvantage in young years to different models of political socialization. In empirical terms, this paper directly analyses the effects of economic shocks on attitudes towards income differences in different parts of the life course. Most importantly, this allows me to compare the effects of economic shocks during and after the so-called impressionable years. Furthermore, using standard fixed effects models and fixed effects models with individual slopes allows me to decompose associations into a causal part, a part driven by time-constant factors (finished socialization experiences), and a time-varying part (ongoing reactions to economic risks / ongoing socialization experiences throughout adult-life)

The results based on the longitudinal data of the Dutch LISS data show that only young people react directly to job loss with more negative attitudes towards income differences. But while for older people I cannot detect a similar causal effect, this is only due to the fact that they adapt their attitudes to changing economic risks before they lose their jobs. The first set of the results clearly highlights the relevance of the impressionable years for political attitudes. However, the second set of the results also point to the limitations of arguments pointing solely to the impressionable years.