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...

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...

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’...

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...

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...

Gender gaps in political ideology transformed from traditional gaps (women showing more right-leaning than men) to modern gaps (women showing more left-leaning) in the last four decades in Western countries. However, Spain lagged behind in this transformation. This paper analyses how labour...

The study measures scientists’ polarization on social media and its impact on public perceptions of their credibility. Analyzing 98,000 scientists on Twitter from 2016 to 2022 reveals significant divergence in expressed political opinions. An experiment assesses the impact of online political...

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...

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)....

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...

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...

There is a concern that citizens with different political positions and party affiliations increasingly dislike each other. We examine this affective polarization (AP), which is often associated with a weakening of democracy, in the context of Switzerland's multiparty landscape with proportional...

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...

In this paper, we focus on individuals' perceptions of their own position within the income distribution and argue that ideological biases influence these perceptions. In particular, we take into account the two-dimensional ideological space of European party systems and develop arguments about...

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...

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...