Publikationsliste KOPS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Sámi people stand out as the only Indigenous minority in an egalitarian European context, namely the Nordic Countries. Therefore, inequalities that they may face are worth closer inspection. Drawing on the distinction between inequalities among individuals (vertical) and between groups (horizontal), we investigate how different types of inequalities affect the Sámi today. We formulate a series of hypotheses on how social, economic, cultural, and political inequalities are linked with discrimination experience, and test these with original data from a population survey conducted in northern Norway and northern Sweden simultaneously in 2021. The findings show that Sámi ethnic background increases the probability of experiencing discrimination. While individual-level economic inequality is also pertinent, this does not directly materialise as between-group inequality. Instead, minority language use is a strong predictor of discrimination experience, revealing the socio-cultural nature of ethnic inequalities. Cross-country differences are only reflected in the effect of minority language use.

This article explores how level of education and region of origin (EU versus non-EU) shape newcomers’ perceptions of being welcome and treated fairly upon arrival, as well as their feelings of closeness and belonging to majority members and their long-term commitment to their new country of residence. Our results show that the impact of these factors – education and EU background – varies between these dimensions in shaping individuals’ attitudes and feelings about their new home. Feelings of being welcome and treated fairly do not differ much between origin groups per se, but they do differ between highly skilled and less-skilled migrants, although in a paradoxical way. Skilled third-country nationals are more skeptical than individuals with lower levels of education, and they are also more likely to feel marginalized. As regards the other dimensions, origin clearly trumps education. Although EU migrants are not particularly skeptical about Germany, they feel less close to it and more hesitant to make a long-term commitment to the country. Our analysis shows that skilled migrants do not relate in a consistent or homogeneous way to their destination country.

In 2020, the German government supported the COVID-19 recovery fund ‘Next Generation EU’, which according to many observers is breaking with the taboo of joint EU debt liability. In this article, we analyse whether this decision marks a programmatic shift towards fiscal integration, taken in isolation by the Chancellor, or whether it can be reconciled with higher-level principles that guided the Chancellor’s previous European policies? Our analysis builds on a synthetic framework combining a multi-level principal-agent account with ideational components. The empirical analysis of Bundestag debates and original public opinion data reveal that the support for ‘Next Generation EU’ neither breaks with the Chancellor’s established ‘conservational-pragmatic’ approach to EU policy-making, nor separates the Chancellor from the preferences of the Bundestag and the public. Content analyses show how the government and its supporting camp in the Bundestag justified the apparent policy shift, underlining a strong agreement towards strengthening the EU in times of an unseen crisis, while at the same time revealing some noteworthy partisan differences.

Researchers, politicians, and pundits commonly expect that voters retrospectively punish and reward government parties for tax policies, but there is surprisingly little cross-country evidence that backs this claim. This study provides comprehensive evidence from 30 OECD countries, 1970–2020. It analyzes the electoral fates of government parties that increased or cut taxes on personal incomes and consumption. Our findings confirm the prevalence of electoral consequences, but these depend on the type and direction of tax change. Government parties lose votes when they increase personal income taxes while there is only marginal evidence suggesting electoral reward for income tax increases and electoral consequences after value-added tax changes. The findings also indicate the distributive effects of reforms to matter. The most pronounced consequences arise when governments raise income taxes on the poor. The moderating role of conditional factors such as government partisanship and fiscal pressure are explored, but no consensus emerges from the findings.