Publikationsliste KOPS

Politicians often engage in blame avoidance behaviours in order to evade electoral punishment following allegations of misconduct. A key question concerns the (in)effectiveness of such behaviours in mitigating voter opinions about the alleged misconduct and the appropriate punishment. In this article, we examine how this (in)effectiveness may be shaped by: (1) the characteristics of blame avoidance behaviours, and (2) voters' partisan (mis)alignment with the alleged offender. We address this question using a between-subject survey experiment among a sample of Norwegian citizens (N = 1996). Our main findings suggest that blame avoidance behaviours can be effective in mitigating voters' assessment of the alleged misconduct and of the punishment the politician should face. This is particularly true when it concerns politicians from respondents' most-preferred party, and among left-wing voters. These findings help explain when and why scandals may (fail to) affect politicians’ electoral fortunes.

Refugee men are found to be less deserving of government support than refugee women. However, is this still the case if they engage in economic reciprocal behavior and attitudes? Following theories on gender stereotypes and benevolent sexism, we argue that economic activity is expected less of female than of male refugees and that this translates into gendered perceptions of deservingness of financial support. Analyzing data from a 2016 factorial survey experiment in Germany, we show that male refugees are more likely to get “punished” if unwilling to work. Future studies should thus include gender-related aspects when assessing deservingness perceptions.

Does technological change fuel political disruption? Drawing on fine-grained labor market data from Germany, this paper examines how technological change affects regional electorates. We first show that the well-known decline in manufacturing and routine jobs in regions with higher robot adoption or investment in information and communication technology (ICT) was more than compensated by parallel employment growth in the service sector and cognitive non-routine occupations. This change in the regional composition of the workforce has important political implications: Workers trained for these new sectors typically hold progressive political values and support progressive pro-system parties. Overall, this composition effect dominates the politically perilous direct effect of automation-induced substitution. As a result, technology-adopting regions are unlikely to turn into populist-authoritarian strongholds.

Given that Facebook is still the most widely used social networking site in the world, its influence on democratic processes is under constant scrutiny. Academics have put a special focus on Facebook’s role in inhibiting or enhancing citizens’ news exposure. Recent studies using digital behavioral data have analyzed the prevalence and effects of “Facebook news referrals.” Using a web tracking tool that captures general browsing behavior as well as public posts seen on Facebook, this paper lays the groundwork for the field by assessing the validity of previously proposed operationalizations. We validate news referrals by investigating whether different measures actually reflect exposure to a news URL a user saw on Facebook. We furthermore assess the effects of news referrals on central outcomes in extant literature, contingent on different operationalizations. The results show that the most precise measure of news referrals are click identifiers attached to news URLs by Facebook. Different operationalizations of referrals have theoretically impactful consequences for the substantive understanding of Facebook’s role in high-choice online environments. The paper demonstrates the need for academics to constantly innovate in order to measure citizens’ online behavior in an ecologically valid manner.

Students from a high socioeconomic background show relatively homogeneous, high levels of educational attainment, whereas students with a low socioeconomic origin display a large variability in their educational careers. In this paper, we examine whether the varying degrees of students’ academic self-efficacy can contribute to an explanation of this variation. Focusing on Germany’s highly stratified educational system, we utilized the CILS4EU dataset to analyse the association between the academic self-efficacy of students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds in 9th grade and their later educational aspirations and transitions. Our results show that students from non-academic families are much more likely to (a) aspire to an Abitur, (b) transition to upper secondary school, and (c) enter tertiary education if they exhibit a high level of academic self-efficacy. In contrast, academic self-efficacy shows no link to the educational aspirations and decisions of students who have at least one parent with an academic certificate.

A vast literature has examined how perceptions of mobility shape demand for redistribution. These studies generally refer to contemporaneous tax policies demanded by those directly impacted. But social mobility is often measured as changes across generations. To account for these intergenerational effects, our analysis focuses on educational policies. We examine how social mobility at the district level explains legislative support for inclusive education policies. We first develop an electoral competition model where voters are altruistic parents, politicians are office seeking and the future economic status of the children is affected both by the degree of income mobility and by public education policies. We then analyze a newly compiled dataset of roll-call votes on California education legislation matched with electoral district levels of income mobility. In line with the model, our analysis suggests that upward mobility in a district negatively predicts legislative support for redistributive education bills.

To what extent, and under what conditions, have workfare reforms shaped public opinion towards the unemployed? This article unpacks the punitive and enabling dimensions of the workfare turn and examines how changes to the rights and obligations of the unemployed have influenced related policy preferences. To do so, it presents a novel dataset on these reforms across a diverse set of welfare states and investigates potential feedback effects by combining our data with four waves of survey data from Europe and North America. Results suggest that while enabling measures generate more lenient attitudes towards the unemployed, punitive measures have no clear effect on public opinion – but they do accentuate the gap between the preferences of high- and low-income individuals. This leads us to conclude that the trend towards punitive and enabling measures since the 1980s has not broadly undermined solidarity with the unemployed, though it has increased income-based polarization.

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) will greatly impact the lives of individuals with visual impairments, but how they differ in expectations compared to sighted individuals is not clear. The present research reports results based on survey responses from 114 visually impaired participants and 117 panel recruited participants without visual impairments, from Germany. Their attitudes towards autonomous vehicles and their expectations for consequences of wide-spread adoption of CAVs are assessed. Results indicate significantly more positive CAV attitudes in participants with visual impairments compared to those without visual impairments. Mediation analyses indicate that visually impaired individuals’ more positive CAV attitudes (compared to sighted individuals’) are largely explained by higher hopes for independence, and more optimistic expectations regarding safety and sustainability. Policy makers should ensure accessibility without sacrificing goals for higher safety and lower ecological impact to make CAVs an acceptable inclusive mobility solution.

Economic inequality constitutes a defining challenge of our time and it remains puzzling why rising levels of inequality have not led to more redistribution. In this article a novel individual-level perspective is taken, with a focus on how much legislators and citizens agree on questions of redistribution and inequality, and what causes these mismatches. The study compares legislators’ views to a representative citizen sample in Switzerland. The results show considerable disagreement between the groups with legislators being more sceptical towards redistribution and seeing inequality as fairer outcome. The mismatch is only partially explained by legislators’ higher social status. Ideology plays a fundamental role as more polarisation according to ideological lines is found among elites and their attitudes are also more rooted in their ideology. In sum, the findings point to some underexplored angles of the puzzle of why not more redistribution has been observed and thus offer a valuable addition to the existing literature.