papers

2022

1. OSF

   The Consequences of Punishing Political Ideologies in Democracies – Evidence from Employment Bans in Germany

   with Vicente Valentim.

   2022

   Abstract URL

   How can states counter growing political radicalism? We look at the effect of states persecuting “extreme” individuals by studying the case of the Anti-Radical Decree in West Germany. Implemented in 1972, this policy allowed individuals with connections to mostly communist groups to be banned from working in the public sector. Drawing upon a newly collected data set of individuals targeted by the bans, we run regression models to estimate the effect of such bans on the political behavior of German citizens measured in surveys and official election results. In particular, we look at the long-term effects of the bans by estimating their effects on establishing the Green party, formed a few years after the policy was first implemented. We find that counties that experienced bans are significantly more likely to take protest against the bans on the streets and subsequently vote for the Green party. Added to that individuals, who voice opposition to the bans in surveys are more likely to support the Greens. The effect is stronger in counties that were more leftist, politicized, and had more public sector workers. Our findings have implications for the sets of policies democracies can use to ensure their institutional survival.

2. OSF

   Simplifying Politics: The Impact of Linguistic Style on Citizens’ Political Knowledge and Beliefs About Politicians

   with Roman Senninger.

   2022

   Abstract URL

   How do the tone and style of political messages affect citizens? While research has examined how politicians use these elements to distinguish themselves, little is known about how they resonate with citizens. We theorize that using simple language in communication can increase citizens’ political knowledge and influence their beliefs about politicians. Simple language can be perceived as a signal that the politician is relatable and may increase public support. In a study conducted in Germany using pre-registered and large-scale survey experiments, respondents were shown political statements that varied in linguistic simplicity and other factors. The results indicate that simplicity improves citizens’ political knowledge and helps them fill in gaps in information about politicians’ socio-economic backgrounds. Additionally, simplicity was found to moderate the effect of politicians’ policy positions. Our findings suggest that linguistic styles can be a powerful tool in contemporary political campaigns.

3. OSF

   Using the Party as a Shield? How British MPs Explain Policy Positions to Constituents

   with Vanessa Cheng-Matsuno, Gidon Cohen, Sarah Cohen, Florian Foos, Patrick M. Kuhn, Kyriaki Nanou, Neil Visalvanich, Nick Vivyan.

   2022

   Abstract URL

   How do legislators respond to constituents’ requests? Recent studies showcase that US legislators are particularly responsive to their voters, even tailoring their messages toward them. But little research investigates if these findings hold for parliamentary systems which are characterized by high party discipline forcing legislators to fall in line. We theorize that in such systems legislators use their party as a shield if their opinion contradicts their constituents’ positional wishes. We test our argument in an audit study involving both legislators and actual voters during the Brexit negotiations in 2019 in the United Kingdom. Contrary to conventional wisdom about party-dominated systems we find no evidence that MPs are less responsive to correspondence from party-incongruent constituents nor that they use their party as a shield. These null findings have important implications for our understanding of how legislative behavior in parliamentary systems is (not) constrained by party discipline.

4. OSF

   Place-Based Policies and Inequality Within Regions

   with Valentin Lang, Nils Redeker.

   2022

   Abstract URL

   Against the backdrop of rising inequality across regions, place-based policies have become a popular tool to support "left-behind" areas. While existing research has studied their aggregate growth effects, we lack evidence on how income gains from such policies are distributed within regions. As income differences within supported regions are often large, understanding their distributional effects, however, matters for both efficacy and equity reasons. Based on household data from more than 2.4 million survey respondents in the 1989-2017 period, we compile the first panel data set on income inequality within subnational regions in Europe. These data show that inequality within regions is substantial, tends to increase over time and contributes more to inequality in Europe than inequality across regions. We then study the distributional effects on household incomes of one of the world’s largest placed-based policies, the EU Cohesion Policy. For causal identification we use, first, a discontinuity in disbursed amounts that results from eligibility criteria and, second, a difference-in-differences design. The results show an economically substantial, positive effect of place-based funds on household incomes that is largest at the top of intra-regional income distributions and insignificant for the bottom 40 percent. The place-based policy increases inequality within regions. To study the mechanisms, we differentiate by production factors, sectors, and education levels with both macro and micro data and find that the effects are driven by higher labor incomes for more highly educated individuals in multiple sectors.

5. OSF

   Out-group Threat and Xenophobic Hate Crimes: Evidence of Local Intergroup Conflict Dynamics between Immigrants and Natives

   with Sascha Riaz, Markus Wagner.

   revise & resubmit: Journal of Politics 2022

   Abstract URL

   This study examines the relationship between crimes attributed to immigrants and hate crimes against refugees at the local level. We argue that localized crime events attributed to immigrants can lead natives to exact retribution against uninvolved out-group members. We investigate such intergroup conflict dynamics between immigrants and natives in Germany, a country that has in recent years experienced a sharp increase in both the foreign-born population and hate crimes. Our empirical analysis leverages fine-grained geo-coded data on more than 9,400 hate crimes and 60,000 immigrant-attributed crime events between 2015 and 2019. Using a regression discontinuity in time design (RDiT), we show that the daily probability of hate crimes doubles in the immediate aftermath of an immigrant crime event in a local community. Additional evidence points to mobilization rather than legitimization as a likely mechanism. Our results speak to growing concerns about xenophobic violence in Western democracies.

6. OSF

   Wealth of Tongues: Why Peripheral Regions Vote for the Radical Right in Germany

   with Daniel Ziblatt, Hanno Hilbig.

   revise & resubmit: American Political Science Review 2022

   Abstract URL

   Why is support for the radical right higher in some geographic locations than others? This paper argues that what is frequently classified as the “rural” bases of radical right support in previous research is in part the result of something different: communities that were in the historical “periphery” in the center-periphery conflicts of modern nation-state formation. Inspired by a classic state-building literature that emphasizes the prevalence of a “wealth of tongues” (Weber 1976)—or nonstandard linguistic dialects in a region—as a definition of the periphery, we use data from more than 725,000 geo-coded responses in a linguistic survey in Germany to show that voters from historically peripheral geographic communities are more likely to vote for the radical right today.

2021

1. OSF

   Lost in Transition – Where Are All the Social Democrats Today?

   with Thomas Kurer.

   prepared for an edited book by Silja Häusermann and Herbert Kitschelt 2021

   Abstract URL

   This chapter follows individual voter flows using panel data for Social Democrats in Germany (1984-2018), the United Kingdom (1991-2018) and Switzerland (1999-2018). To our knowledge this chapter, thus, provides the first long running study of individual voting transitions amongst Social Democratic voters, following their transitions for almost 40 years. The key goal of this chapter is to understand where initial voters of the Social Democrats are today and which individual level characteristics correlate with leaving SDs. We find: 1) Social Democrats manage to keep some of their core 2) but a lot of their core gets de-mobilized or moves on to more progressive options (Greens, LibDem, Green Liberal Party). 3) SDs struggle in all countries to attract new voters, less so in Switzerland which we think is at least partly due to the progressive offer provided by the SP. In contrast, the German SPD loses to everyone and gains almost nothing. We also find evidence that SDs die out: the key factor correlated with ‘leaving’ is the generational cohort Social Democrats belong to. In contrast, often theorized and emphasized factors such as occupation, income or unemployment show much smaller correlations with former Social Democrats’ decision to leave the party behind.

2. The Political Legacies of Military Service: Evidence From a Natural Experiment

   available upon request 2021

   Abstract

   Does military service affect draftees’ political attitudes after service? While a rich body of research investigates the effects of combat participation on soldiers’ attitudes, we know little about the effects of military service in the absence of combat. However, a widely shared concern is that the military socializes its draftees into authoritarian values running orthogonal to the values of civilians’ lives in democracies. I identify the causal effect of compulsory military service on recruits’ political attitudes by studying the quasi-random assignment of the re-introduced draft in Germany in 1956 using the German Socio-Economic Panel. I find that draftees are more left-leaning and show higher trust in foreigners even 40 years after their service; but also that in most regards serving has no effects on recruits. To better understand the mechanisms behind these long-term legacy effects I rely on a three-wave panel of draftees conducted by the military in 1966. Panel analyses reveal that recruits’ experiences during service do not travel beyond the workplace. Overall, the findings imply that in many ways our experiences at our workplaces might have a much smaller effect on our attitudes and values than previous research suggests.

3. Does Exposure to Radical Right Rallies Affect Political Behavior and Preferences – Evidence From the Far Right Pegida Movement in Germany

   available upon request 2021

   Abstract

   What are the effects of far right movements on citizens’ electoral behavior and preferences? Previous research implies that protests and social movements can sway the public towards their goals. However research that actually studies the effect of local protests on the local community and public is scarce. Collecting the full history of local mobilization by a German anti-migration, radical right movement – the ‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicisation of the Occident (PEGIDA)’ – on the street-level I study the effects on the affected communities by using Difference-in-Differences and matching methods. I find that PEGIDA increased voting for radical right parties and made the public support stricter limits on migration. But not all citizens react equally: the effects are driven by mainstream right voters, while the left backlashes. The findings have important implications for the study of public opinion in contemporary societies and political science understanding of protesters’ relevance.

2020

1. How Perception of Support Drives Vote Switching to Challenger Parties

   with Denis Cohen.

   available upon request 2020

ongoing

1. Can Populist Parties Increase Electoral Turnout? The Case of the M5S Movement in Italy

   with Tim Lars Allinger, Thomas Kurer.

   ongoing

   Abstract

   Can populist parties increase electoral turnout? On the one hand, classical scholarship suggests that populist movements mobilize disenfranchised citizens by providing an alternative to established parties – the “corrective for democracy” hypothesis. On the other hand, populist parties might as well decrease voter turnout by inflaming societal divides and excluding minority groups. We turn to the Italian Movimento Cinque Stelle, arguably one of the most relevant populist parties, which followed the unusual practice of coordinating all political activities on a public online platform. We webscraped the entire event history of the Movement’s more than 1,000 local branches with over 200,000 geocoded political activities to study how the staggered local emergence of M5S chapters affects electoral turnout. Using staggered difference-in-differences models on election results and surveys spanning thirty years, our preliminary analyses suggest that the rise of M5S decreases turnout. Our findings have important implications for the study of turnout in contemporary democracies and the negative consequences of populism in the electoral arena.

2. Social Desirability Bias as Substance and Not Nuisance

   with Tim Lars Allinger, Morgan Le Corre Juratic, Kristian Vrede Skaaning Frederiksen.

   ongoing

   Abstract

   Social scientists have long debated the question of how threatening social desirability biases are for what scientists can learn from survey respondents. Until today such biases are treated as a nuisance at best. In contrast, we argue that social desirability biases are key to understand for social scientists as they are important proxies for social norms and the need for conformity within societies. We compare six different designs to measure social desirability bias in relation to support for democracy in three European countries. Besides a list experiment, we rely on various approaches that trigger respondents’ need to provide socially acceptable answers. We show that triggering social desirability is outperforming list experiments and observational measures for various reasons. Most importantly it allows researchers to test whether social desirability is actually manipulated. It also ensures that social desirability is not treated as a nuisance but as a matter of substantive research interest.

3. The Role of Social Norms for Democracies: Who Is a True Democrat?

   with Tim Lars Allinger, Morgan Le Corre Juratic, Kristian Vrede Skaaning Frederiksen.

   ongoing

   Abstract

   Generations of political scientists seek to understand the relationship between citizens’ democratic values and democratic stability. The key premise of this research tradition is that democratic societies live on a “social consensus” over a set of democratic values; a democratic norm. Yet, until today scholarship has neither carefully theorized the role of nor measured democratic norms. Building on research in Social Psychology, we conceptualize democratic norms as social norms: citizens may think that most people in democracies support its institutions (descriptive social norm) and also that one is ought to do so (injunctive social norm). Using survey experiments priming social desirability bias, we then measure these democratic norms in 12 democracies. Our research has important implications for research on democracy showcasing the role social norms play to craft true democrats in our societies.

4. Social Norms, Local Opinion Leaders, and Support for Policy Proposals

   with Julia Schulte-Cloos, Roman Senninger.

   ongoing

   Abstract

   By involving ordinary citizens in decision-making, citizens’ assemblies can help to strengthen legitimacy and trust in democratic institutions. While previous literature has focused primarily on the effects on citizens’ trust in democratic decision-making processes, we have little insight into the potential effects they have in influencing public opinion on salient policy issues. As the recommendations or decisions made by the participants can be widely publicized, the positions advanced by ordinary citizens can provide the public with relevant cues on social norms around a given issue. This may have significant implications for voters’ opinion formation, particularly if they share a common social identity with the citizen representative. To test this argument, we present a visual conjoint experiment designed to closely mirror the actual online participation forum of the Conference for the Future of Europe, one of the largest citizens’ assemblies ever undertaken. By virtue of the conjoint design, we experimentally manipulate the policy position of the message, the extent to which the sender is conceived as an opinion leader, the polarization associated with the policy position put forward, and the sender’s shared local social identity.

5. The Unexpected Democrats? Democratic Norms Protection in Context of Affective Polarization

   with Morgan Le Corre Juratic, Markus Wagner.

   ongoing