This paper examines the relationship between zero-sum thinking, political views, and individual well-being in Switzerland. Zero-sum thinking refers to the belief that resources are finite, and that one person’s gain must come at the expense of another. Using survey data from over 11,000...

In theory, voter attitudes towards policy changes (e.g., whether to increase the minimum wage) ought to depend on their beliefs about the current level of the relevant policy variable. In this paper, I test this hypothesis using a large-scale (n = 5, 000) and pre-registered survey experiment...

Technocracy has come to be increasingly regarded as a threat to representative democracy. Significant attention has thus been recently devoted to exploring public preferences towards technocratic institutions. Elected policymakers’ attitudes have instead not been investigated as...

How does polarization - as measured by mistreatment of political rivals - spread? In an online experiment, participants choose between splitting financial resources equally or discriminating against a member of the opposing political party. We vary the information subjects receive about others'...

Flamino et al. (2023) estimate the levels of ideological polarization and echo chamber behavior for Twitter (now X) users during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections using political bias classification and network analysis methods. Using 873 million tweets, they find a decline in the...

We study how preferences for migration-related narratives differ between private and public contexts and how social media fuel opinion polarization. Using a German representative sample (n=1,226), we found that individuals, especially from the left and center, avoided publicly endorsing...

This paper investigates whether political partisanship and political narratives affect voters' opinions about public finances. In a novel survey experiment, we test the causal effect of pro-consolidation and pro-public investment narratives used in German general election campaigns on...

We present a self- and social-signaling model formalizing findings in political psychology that moral and political judgments stem primarily from intuition and emotion, while reasoning serves to rationalize these intuitions to maintain an image of impartiality. In social interactions, agents’...

Political polarization is an increasing global concern. Although recent research suggests that media exposure can mitigate polarization through persuasion, it is unclear whether polarized individuals are willing to engage with diverse news sources, especially in electoral autocracies where...

Seit Jahren verzeichnen Gewerkschaften in Deutschland massive Mitgliederverluste. Während die Mitgliederzahlen des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes (DGB) nach der deutschen Wiedervereinigung Anfang der 1990er Jahre noch die 10-Millionen-Marke überschritten hatten, sind laut Angaben des DGB im...

Over the past two decades, support for Eurosceptic parties has climbed from fringe to nearly one-third of voters. Promising renewed prosperity through less European integration, these parties imply Euroscepticism is a 'free lunch.' Drawing on an original panel of 1,166 European NUTS-3 regions...

This paper shows how enduring agrarian institutions shaped the long-run political consequences of historical shocks. We study Italy's sharecropping system (mezzadria)-a centuries-old fifty-fifty contract that structured rural relations across central Italy-and link its prewar prevalence to...

Part I. Introduction -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Part II. Theoretical Framework -- Chapter 2. Political Discontent: Specificity, Trajectory, and Discontent -- Chapter 3. The Unique Problem of Political Disaffection -- Chapter 4. Digital Platforms and their Democratic Role -- Chapter 5....

Given the recent reconcentration of the economy in many private industries, the impact of working in firms of different sizes on occupational and political outcomes is of renewed interest. Using micro-level data for the US and Germany, two most dissimilar cases in terms of labor market and...

Eine starke demokratische Kultur ist entscheidend für den Erhalt einer funktionierenden Demokratie. Die Perspektiven junger Menschen bezüglich politischer Maßnahmen spielen dabei eine bedeutende Rolle, da sie Tendenzen der Bevölkerung erkennen lassen und gerade in Krisenzeiten...

This study experimentally investigates the role of politics in hiring decisions. Participants acted as employers, determining the highest wage to offer candidates based only on their demographic characteristics, education, and partisanship. We find that both Democratic and Republican...

We develop a model to analyze policymakers’ incentives to install policy rules, comparing the case of no rule with a binding and a contingent policy rule that allows policymakers to suspend the rule in response to a sufficiently large shock. First, abstracting from political polarization, we...

Value issues such as climate policy, immigration, or identity politics are among the most polarizing policy issues in the U.S. and other high-income countries. That polarization has been rising over the last decades. I investigate a novel channel of income inequality and political campaign...

We track the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on political preferences through "high" and "low" phases of the pandemic. We ask about the effects of the health and the economic costs of the pandemic measured at both personal and municipality levels. Consistent with the literature, we estimate...

Given the recent reconcentration of the economy in many private industries, the impact of working in firms of different sizes on occupational and political outcomes is of renewed interest. Using micro-level data for the US and Germany, two most dissimilar cases in terms of labor market and...

Kao et al. (2024) use phone-based survey experiments in Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco to test whether established theories about the effect of descriptive representation on perceived democratic legiti- macy hold in the Middle East. They find that the presence of women in deliberative bodies...

Tappin, Berinsky, and Rand (2023) find that the effectiveness of persuasive messaging is not diminished by countervailing in-party leader cues, using a survey experiment fielded in the United States. In this robustness reproduction, we briefly summarize the original design and results before...

We study the effect of terrorist attacks on the migration discourse in the European Parliament (EP). First, using an LLM model, we develop an original dataset on sentiments of all parliamentary speeches concerning migration for 2009-2019, building on a novel dataset by Sylvester et al. (2023)....

In a democracy, it is essential that citizens accept rules and laws, regardless of which party is in power. We study why citizens in polarized societies resist rules implemented by political opponents. This may be due to the rules’ specific content, but also because of a general preference...