Research on conspiracy theories and predictors that explain susceptibility to believing in conspiracy theories (conspiracy mentality) has already led to a considerable body of academic contributions. Nevertheless, we see the necessity to continue working on higher-level frameworks that summarize...

We present the first systematic analysis of how countries cover each other in the news, using a newly constructed dataset of 55,240 media sources from 176 countries between 2015 and 2022, drawing upon a corpus of 1.4 billion online news articles. We document a pattern of global media bias:...

I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The...

We provide causal evidence that immigration has contributed to the polarization of American politics. Using an ancestry-based shift-share instrument, we study immigration flows into U.S. counties between 1992 and 2016. Counties exposed to larger immigrant inflows become more polarized both in...

Do factual immigration updates shift societal concerns across political ideologies? Conducting an online experiment in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, respondents provided local immigrant stock and flow estimates before being randomized to receive realistic information on...

Das Working Paper zeigt anhand von zwei Fallbeispielen, wie die sogenannte Neue Rechte linke und sozialpolitische Ansätze rezipiert: Die selektive und rhetorische Übernahme einiger solcher Ideen dient der Provokation, der Reduktion von Angriffsflächen und der scheinbaren Bearbeitung der...

Populist governance is fundamentally at odds with constitutionalism. As a political project, populism rejects constraints on "the will of the people," including those essential to liberal-democratic constitutions. Yet, the extent to which elected populists actually undermine constitutional order...

Populist policies are known to generate a walking stick pattern of high output growth and low inflation followed by low growth and high inflation. Traditionally, researchers viewed this as resulting primarily from populist monetary and fiscal policies that ignore intertemporal budget...

Populist policies are known to generate a walking stick pattern of high output growth and low inflation followed by low growth and high inflation. Traditionally, researchers viewed this as resulting primarily from populist monetary and fiscal policies that ignore intertemporal budget...

Populist governance is fundamentally at odds with constitutionalism. As a political project, populism rejects constraints on "the will of the people," including those essential to liberal-democratic constitutions. Yet, the extent to which elected populists actually undermine constitutional order...

This article examines the contentious debate surrounding Universal Basic Income (UBI)-an unconditional, equal, and permanent cash payment providing basic needs for all citizens-from an ideological left-right perspective. It analyzes key arguments made by proponents and opponents on both sides,...

This is the last out of four papers on the 2025 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021 Bundestag elections. First, we apply the model from [Tangian 2022b] to construct the 2025 German political spectrum understood as a contiguous party ordering, i.e.,...

This research examines impacts of austerity on the political instability in the European Union, defined as elevated levels of electoral volatility and ideological polarization. By analyzing macroeconomic theories that elucidate the effects of austerity on citizens' wealth and the national...

This paper establishes three novel findings on fairness and redistribution by combining theory-driven experimental games with large-scale surveys in the U.S. and five European countries. First, individuals revealing egalitarian, libertarian, or meritocratic fairness preferences in experimental...

Scholars have called for additional research into the antecedents to corporate political activity (CPA), including why firms may engage in specific kinds of CPA. In response, in what we believe to be a first-of-itskind study, we rely on upper echelons theory to explore the relationship between...

This study contributes to the growing debate over the narrow ideological discourse in economics education and calls for greater pluralism. Using a randomized controlled experiment with 2,735 economics students from 10 countries, we examine how authority and ideological biases - shaped by...

When environmental regulations are unpopular, policymakers often attribute resistance to information frictions and poor communication. We test this idea in the context of a major climate policy: Germany’s Heating Law of 2023, which mandates the phase-out of fossil fuel heating. Through a...

Geographic disparities in mortality rates in the US are pronounced and growing. The Black-White mortality gap is volatile but persistent, while the Rich-Poor mortality gap is increasing dramatically. While the causes of these inequalities are not understood, recent attention has focused on the...

In 1975, a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Jefferson County, KY. In order to approximately equalize the share of minorities across schools, students were assigned to a busing schedule that depended on the first letter of their last name. We use the resulting...

Das Working Paper zeigt anhand von zwei Fallbeispielen, wie die sogenannte Neue Rechte linke und sozialpolitische Ansätze rezipiert: Die selektive und rhetorische Übernahme einiger solcher Ideen dient der Provokation, der Reduktion von Angriffsflächen und der scheinbaren Bearbeitung der...

We study how citizens' right to directly decide on policies through popular initiatives affects the attractiveness of extreme candidates in representative elections. In our theoretical framework, single prominent policy issues on which individual voters hold extreme views get a large weight in...

This essay argues for an integrative move in the investigation of the politics of "green" finance. We suggest that approaching the politics of "green" finance in the form of knowledge contestations can bring out complementarities and bridge divides between different levels of analysis and...