Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults "… [are] you…very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic...

Labor unions' greatest potential for political influence likely arises from their direct connection to millions of individuals at the workplace. There, they may change the ideological positions of both unionizing workers and their non-unionizing management. In this paper, we analyze the...

We develop a novel measure of political slant in research to examine whether political ideology influences the content and use of academic research. Our measure examines the frequency of citations from think tanks with different political ideologies and allows us to examine both the supply and...

We develop a model of elections in which parties choose their ideological position and the ideology of their candidates. Tighter candidate selection reduces policy uncertainty for voters. We show that weak institutional constraints, as in a Presidential regime, induce parties to allow their...

Politicians’ behavioral changes as an election nears have typically been attributed to the incentive effects of an election. I document that behavioral changes can occur even for unelected judges. Using data from 1925-2002 on U.S. appellate judges, who are appointed for life, I find that just...

In this study, we experimentally analyze public goods games with an interior provision point. The role of ideology is tested in two different environments in which the political affiliation of group members is manipulated. While in the first experiment, participants’ ideology was no salient,...

Guay and Johnston (2022) examine asymmetric politically motivated reasoning on the part of liberals and conservaites. In our replication of the paper we examine four potential issues with the analysis: confounding in the numeracy task, heterogeneity across ideological constraints, the use of...

Scholars have examined the magnitude of economic loss that a stigmatized organization suffers by studying the effect of stigma on the firm’s stock market valuations. However, the micro-foundations of this negative relationship—through financial analysts’ recommendations and the...

In this paper, we investigate how attachment to religion is connected to conservative gender role beliefs and to what extent they, in turn, materialize into fertility decisions. We also test the hypothesis that exposure to gender-progressive political regimes and ideology can weaken this chain...

Political polarization in society has grown dramatically in recent years. Surveys indicate that the gap in the political opinions of conservatives and liberals has grown sharply over the past three decades (Pew Research Center, 2017), and the partisan divide in attitudes toward political issues...

U.S. congressional roll-call voting records show that as polarization of the two parties along the economic dimension changes, polarization along the social/cultural dimension tends to change in the opposite direction. A model of party competition within a two-dimensional ideology space is...

In a world severely put under stress by COVID-19, generosity becomes increasingly essential both when able to transcend local boundaries, building upon universalistic values, and when directed toward more local contexts, such as the native country. This study aims to investigate an...

This study examines the role of exposure to different beliefs and opinions in the decision making of institutional investors. We exploit geographic variation in social media connections and political ideologies to identify plausible variation in the extent to which institutional investors...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it examines the literature at the intersection of accounting and ideology, focusing on its overall landscape rather than specific areas of the accounting literature. Second, it challenges the dominant ideological paradigms by highlighting the...

Corporate America is increasingly taking public stances on divisive sociopolitical issues via social media. Exploring S&P 1500 firms’ Twitter responses to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement following George Floyd’s death in 2020, we first document a positive association between proxies...

We investigate whether ideology drives the sentiments of parliamentarians when they speak to the central bank they hold accountable. To this end, we collect textual data on the quarterly hearings of the ECB President before the European Parliament from 1999 to 2019. We apply sentiment analysis...

Firms often discourage certain categories of individuals from buying their products, seemingly at odds with typical assumptions about profit maximization. This paper provides a potential rationale for such firm behavior: Consumers seek to signal that they have "desirable" ideological values to...

The confirmation bias is a well-known form of motivated reasoning that serves to protect an individual from cognitive discomfort. Hearing rival viewpoints or belief-opposing information creates cognitive dissonance, and so avoiding exposure to, or discounting the validity of, dissonant...

I investigate the long-term impact of anticommunist education in South Korea on individuals’ political preferences during the years 1954-1987. Based on the individual’s year of birth, I exploit the variation in years of exposure to anticommunist education. I examine the relationship between...

This paper discusses the way forward for social policy in America considering the conflicting religious and political ideologies that confront the polity. The paper applies the Secularized Evangelical Discourse to analyze the position of the religious right, new Christian right and mainstream...

This paper investigates the effects of the political distance between European Commissioners and heads of government on the allocation of funds flowing from the European Union to EU member states. The EU's agricultural and regional budgets offer two particularly interesting case studies due to...

'Hearts and minds' theory contends development aid strengthens community support for counterinsurgents by providing jobs and public goods. Based on field interviews in Kabul, we develop an alternative theoretical framework emphasizing instead the ideological preferences of civilians. In our...

We present the results of an experiment to investigate the determinants of ignoring costless information on measures to address Covid-19. Subjects could choose between two options that differed in their contribution to the Corona Fund of the Red Cross USA and in their own payoffs. Depending on...

Firms often discourage certain categories of individuals from buying their products, seemingly at odds with typical assumptions about profit maximization. This paper provides a potential rationale for such firm behavior: Consumers seek to signal that they have "desirable" ideological values to...

This paper adds to knowledge on the role of politicians' and voters' identities in influencing policy-making in societies marked by ethnic inequality. The outcome we investigate is the initiatives and policies targeting Indigenous populations in the context of Australia. We ask whether and how...

We test the relationship between historical immigration to the United States and political ideology today. We hypothesize that European immigrants brought with them their preferences for the welfare state, and that this had a long-lasting effect on the political ideology of US born individuals....

We investigate the relationship between political attitudes and prosociality in a survey of a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that an experimental measure of prosociality correlates positively with adherence to protective...

We investigate whether ideology drives the sentiments of parliamentarians when they speak to the central bank they hold accountable. To this end, we collect textual data on the quarterly hearings of the ECB President before the European Parliament from 1999 to 2019. We apply sentiment analysis...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chilean Congress approved three laws between July 2020 and April 2021 that allowed early withdrawals of pension funds without any eligibility constraints or penalties. In this paper, we use nationwide survey data to examine the factors associated with...