Delia Baldassarri
Biographic Data
| ID | 91706 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Delia Baldassarri |
| GIVEN NAMES | Delia |
| FAMILY NAME | Baldassarri |
| SIGNATURE | BALDASSARRI D |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9264-035X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1089 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Diversity and Prosociality in NYC Neighborhoods: Evidence from a Lost Wallet Experiment
Partisanship Meets Social Networks: How Politically Heterogeneous Acquaintances and Close Relationships Buffer Partisan Animosity
Politically heterogeneous social networks have long been considered as a safeguard against political division. However, in today’s polarized political climate, the effectiveness of cross-partisan interactions in mitigating animosity is increasingly questioned. Prior research emphasizes the importance of hearing-the-other-side through cross-partisan discussions with close ties. We confirm that these discussions still take place and are related to …
Bridging the Digital Divide Narrows the Participation Gap: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment
Socio-economic inequality in access to the internet has decreased in affluent societies. We investigate how gaining access to the internet affected the civic and political participation of relatively disadvantaged late adopters by studying a quasi-natural experiment related to the American National Election Studies. In 2012, when about 80% of the U.S. population was already connected to the internet, the ANES face-to-face study was for the first …
Prosociality Beyond In-Group Boundaries: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment on Selection and Intergroup Interactions in a Multiethnic European Metropolis
How does prosocial behavior extend beyond in-group boundaries in multiethnic societies? The differentiation of Western societies presents an opportunity to understand the tension between societal pressures that push people outside the comfort zones of their familiar networks to constructively interact with unknown diverse others and the tendency toward homophily and in-group favoritism. We introduce a three-step model of out-group exposure that i…
A generational shift: How partisan alignment and the rise of social issues have produced a generation of Democrats
American political elites are today more neatly divided on a wider range of issues than at any other point in the postwar era. How have these trends affected the political socialization of American youth? We argue that two distinctive aspects of US polarization, namely ideological alignment and the emergence of non-economic issues, have formed the foundation of a generational shift in favor of the Democratic party. We find that Millennials and Ge…
Greater Diversity or Fewer Whites? Disentangling Heterogeneity and Marginalized Group Share at Macro and Micro Levels
Scholarship claims that diversity undermines trust and cooperation. Critiques focus on studies' inability to discern diversity's causal effects. In fact, most studies are unable to distinguish diversity (i.e., mixture) and marginalized group share (e.g., percentage Black). The authors argue for preserving this distinction and identify obstacles to doing so. First, homogeneously disadvantaged communities are acutely underrepresented in North Ameri…
Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts
Immigration, integration and cooperation: Experimental evidence from a public goods game in Italy
Immigration has rapidly changed the demographic profile of most Western European societies, increasing their ethnic diversity. Some cross-disciplinary literature comparing homogeneous and diverse communities provides observational evidence of a link between high levels of ethnoracial diversity and lower levels of public goods provision. While these results are often interpreted as driven by context/interaction effects, whereby individuals lower t…
Everyday Discrimination in Public Spaces: A Field Experiment in the Milan Metro
A large scholarship documents discrimination against immigrants and ethnic minorities in institutional settings such as labour and housing markets in Europe. We know less, however, about discrimination in informal and unstructured everyday encounters. To address this gap, we report results from a large-scale field experiment examining the physical avoidance of immigrants as an unobtrusive yet important measure of everyday discrimination in a mult…
Strangers in Hostile Lands: Exposure to Refugees and Right-Wing Support in Germany’s Eastern Regions
Does local exposure to refugees increase right-wing support? This paper studies a case uniquely suited to address this question: the allocation of refugees to the rural hinterlands of eastern Germany during the European refugee crisis. Similar to non-urban regions elsewhere, the area has had minimal previous exposure to foreigners, but distinctively leans towards the political right. Our data comprise electoral outcomes, and individual-level surv…
Diversity and prosocial behavior
Immigration and globalization have spurred interest in the effects of ethnic diversity in Western societies. Most scholars focus on whether diversity undermines trust, social capital, and collective goods provision. However, the type of prosociality that helps heterogeneous societies function is different from the in-group solidarity that glues homogeneous communities together. Social cohesion in multiethnic societies depends on whether prosocial…
Gendered Discrimination Against Immigrants: Experimental Evidence
Recent migration from Muslim-majority countries has sparked discussions across Europe about the supposed threat posed by new immigrants. Young men make up the largest share of newly arrived immigrants and this demographic is often perceived to be particularly threatening. In this article, we compare pro-sociality and trust toward immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, focusing on gender differences in treatment. We study these questions using…
Was There a Culture War? Partisan Polarization and Secular Trends in US Public Opinion
According to many scholars of public opinion, most of the fast-growing divides between Democrats and Republicans over the last few decades have taken place on moral issues. We find that the process of issue partisanship—the sorting of political preferences along partisan lines—properly accounts for public opinion dynamics in the economic and civil rights domains. However, when it comes to moral issues, the prominent change is a partisan secular t…
The Microrelations of Urban Governance: Dynamics of Patronage and Partnership
The classic urban ecological paradigm envisioned the articulation of the social organization of neighborhoods with that of the city as a whole. This article offers novel empirical evidence in support of this proposition. We analyze the microrelations of governance across two key urban domains, politics and nonprofit organizations, and identify the district-based politician as a key actor linking neighborhood-based and citywide forms of social org…
Does Poverty Undermine Cooperation in Multiethnic Settings? Evidence from a Cooperative Investment Experiment
What undermines cooperation in ethnically diverse communities? Scholars have focused on factors that explain the lack of inter-ethnic cooperation, such as prejudice or the difficulty to communicate and sanction across group boundaries. We direct attention to the fact that diverse communities are also often poor and ask whether poverty, rather than diversity, reduces cooperation. We developed a strategic cooperation game where we vary the income a…
It could turn ugly: Selective disclosure of attitudes in political discussion networks
Field Experiments Across the Social Sciences
Using field experiments, scholars can identify causal effects via randomization while studying people and groups in their naturally occurring contexts. In light of renewed interest in field experimental methods, this review covers a wide range of field experiments from across the social sciences, with an eye to those that adopt virtuous practices, including unobtrusive measurement, naturalistic interventions, attention to realistic outcomes and c…
Breaking Down the State: Protestors Engaged
Recent years have seen an explosion of protest movements around the world, and academic theories are racing to catch up with them. This series aims to further our understanding of the origins, dealings, decisions, and outcomes of social movements by fostering dialogue among many traditions of thought, across European nations and across continents. All theoretical perspectives are welcome. Books in the series typically combine theory with empirica…
Heuristics, Interactions, and Status Hierarchies: An Agent-based Model of Deference Exchange
Since Merton's classical analysis of cumulative advantage in science, it has been observed that status hierarchies display a sizable disconnect between actors' quality and rank and that they become increasingly asymmetric over time, without, however, turning into winner-take-all structures. In recent years, formal models of status hierarchies tried to account for these facts by combining two micro-level, counterbalancing mechanisms: 'social influ…
Love Thy Neighbor? Ethnoracial Diversity and Trust Reexamined
According to recent research, ethnoracial diversity negatively affects trust and social capital. This article challenges the current conception and measurement of "diversity" and invites scholars to rethink "so-cial capital" in complex societies. It reproduces the analysis of Putnam and shows that the association between diversity and self-reported trust is a compositional artifact attributable to residential sorting: non-whites report lower trus…
Cooperative Networks: Altruism, Group Solidarity, Reciprocity, and Sanctioning in Ugandan Producer Organizations
Repeated interaction and social networks are commonly considered viable solutions to collective action problems. This article identifies and systematically measures four general mechanisms--that is, generalized altruism, group solidarity, reciprocity, and the threat of sanctioning--and tests which of them brings about cooperation in the context of Ugandan producer organizations. Using an innovative methodological framework that combines "lab-in-t…
Neither Ideologues nor Agnostics: Alternative Voters' Belief System in an Age of Partisan Politics
How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This article argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americans. The article investigates systematic heterogeneity in the organization of political attitudes using relational class analysis, a graph-based method for detecting multiple patterns of opinion in survey data. Three subpopulation…
The Simple Art of Voting: The Cognitive Shortcuts of Italian Voters
Voting distills a complex decision into a deceptively simple action. The electorate faces a messy tangle of parties, leaders, and issues. How is it possible for voters to unravel it all? How do they perceive the political landscape? How, in short, do voters choose? Not only is voting a complex choice, but voters themselves also vary widely in their degree of interest, and involvement in politics. This book provides a new understanding of how voti…
The Impact of Elections on Cooperation: Evidence from a Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiment in Uganda
Communities often rely on sanctioning to induce public goods contributions. Past studies focus on how external agencies or peer sanctioning induce cooperation. In this article, we focus instead on the role played by centralized authorities, internal to the community. Combining “lab‐in‐the‐field” experiments with observational data on 1,541 Ugandan farmers from 50 communities, we demonstrate the positive effect of internal centralized sanctioning …
Matching
This article examines matching processes, specifically two-sided matching contexts such as marriage and job markets, using an agent-based simulation approach. It begins with a conceptual discussion of matching processes, focusing on four key analytic features that define a matching process: the preferences actors have over characteristics (of alters or of pairings); the distribution of (relevant) characteristics in the population; the information…
Partisans without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion
Public opinion polarization is here conceived as a process of alignment along multiple lines of potential disagreement and measured as growing constraint in individuals' preferences. Using NES data from 1972 to 2004, the authors model trends in issue partisanship—the correlation of issue attitudes with party identification—and issue alignment—the correlation between pairs of issues—and find a substantive increase in issue partisanship, but little…
Dynamics of Political Polarization
This article accounts for two puzzling paradoxes. The first paradox is the simultaneous absence and presence of attitude polarization-the fact that global attitude polarization is relatively rare, even though pundits describe it as common. The second paradox is the simultaneous presence and absence of social polarization-the fact that while individuals experience attitude homogeneity in their interpersonal networks, their networks are characteriz…
Love Thy Neighbor? Ethnoracial Diversity and Trust Reexamined
According to recent research, ethnoracial diversity negatively affects trust and social capital. This article challenges the current conception and measurement of "diversity" and invites scholars to rethink "so-cial capital" in complex societies. It reproduces the analysis of Putnam and shows that the association between diversity and self-reported trust is a compositional artifact attributable to residential sorting: non-whites report lower trus…
Neither Ideologues nor Agnostics: Alternative Voters' Belief System in an Age of Partisan Politics
How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This article argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americans. The article investigates systematic heterogeneity in the organization of political attitudes using relational class analysis, a graph-based method for detecting multiple patterns of opinion in survey data. Three subpopulation…
The Integrative Power of Civic Networks
This article analyzes integrative dynamics within civil society by looking at civic networks—the web of collaborative ties between participatory associations acting on behalf of public and collective interests. Drawing upon evidence from Glasgow and Bristol, the authors identify a polycentric model of civic coordination based on horizontal solidarity, in which associations form dense clusters of strong identity ties (“social bonds”) bridged by fe…
It could turn ugly: Selective disclosure of attitudes in political discussion networks
Cultural Anchors and the Organization of Differences: A Multi-method Analysis of LGBT Marches on Washington
Social scientists describe culture as either coherent or incoherent and political dissent as either unifying or divisive. This article moves beyond such dichotomies. Content, historical, and network analyses of public debates on how to organize four lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Washington marches provide evidence for an integrative position. Rather than just describe consistencies or contradictions, we contend that the key analy…
Was There a Culture War? Partisan Polarization and Secular Trends in US Public Opinion
According to many scholars of public opinion, most of the fast-growing divides between Democrats and Republicans over the last few decades have taken place on moral issues. We find that the process of issue partisanship—the sorting of political preferences along partisan lines—properly accounts for public opinion dynamics in the economic and civil rights domains. However, when it comes to moral issues, the prominent change is a partisan secular t…
The Impact of Elections on Cooperation: Evidence from a Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiment in Uganda
Communities often rely on sanctioning to induce public goods contributions. Past studies focus on how external agencies or peer sanctioning induce cooperation. In this article, we focus instead on the role played by centralized authorities, internal to the community. Combining “lab‐in‐the‐field” experiments with observational data on 1,541 Ugandan farmers from 50 communities, we demonstrate the positive effect of internal centralized sanctioning …
Field Experiments Across the Social Sciences
Using field experiments, scholars can identify causal effects via randomization while studying people and groups in their naturally occurring contexts. In light of renewed interest in field experimental methods, this review covers a wide range of field experiments from across the social sciences, with an eye to those that adopt virtuous practices, including unobtrusive measurement, naturalistic interventions, attention to realistic outcomes and c…
The Social Logic of Politics: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior
Strangers in Hostile Lands: Exposure to Refugees and Right-Wing Support in Germany’s Eastern Regions
Does local exposure to refugees increase right-wing support? This paper studies a case uniquely suited to address this question: the allocation of refugees to the rural hinterlands of eastern Germany during the European refugee crisis. Similar to non-urban regions elsewhere, the area has had minimal previous exposure to foreigners, but distinctively leans towards the political right. Our data comprise electoral outcomes, and individual-level surv…
Cooperative Networks: Altruism, Group Solidarity, Reciprocity, and Sanctioning in Ugandan Producer Organizations
Repeated interaction and social networks are commonly considered viable solutions to collective action problems. This article identifies and systematically measures four general mechanisms--that is, generalized altruism, group solidarity, reciprocity, and the threat of sanctioning--and tests which of them brings about cooperation in the context of Ugandan producer organizations. Using an innovative methodological framework that combines "lab-in-t…
The Microrelations of Urban Governance: Dynamics of Patronage and Partnership
The classic urban ecological paradigm envisioned the articulation of the social organization of neighborhoods with that of the city as a whole. This article offers novel empirical evidence in support of this proposition. We analyze the microrelations of governance across two key urban domains, politics and nonprofit organizations, and identify the district-based politician as a key actor linking neighborhood-based and citywide forms of social org…
Heuristics, Interactions, and Status Hierarchies: An Agent-based Model of Deference Exchange
Since Merton's classical analysis of cumulative advantage in science, it has been observed that status hierarchies display a sizable disconnect between actors' quality and rank and that they become increasingly asymmetric over time, without, however, turning into winner-take-all structures. In recent years, formal models of status hierarchies tried to account for these facts by combining two micro-level, counterbalancing mechanisms: 'social influ…
Gendered Discrimination Against Immigrants: Experimental Evidence
Recent migration from Muslim-majority countries has sparked discussions across Europe about the supposed threat posed by new immigrants. Young men make up the largest share of newly arrived immigrants and this demographic is often perceived to be particularly threatening. In this article, we compare pro-sociality and trust toward immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, focusing on gender differences in treatment. We study these questions using…
Everyday Discrimination in Public Spaces: A Field Experiment in the Milan Metro
A large scholarship documents discrimination against immigrants and ethnic minorities in institutional settings such as labour and housing markets in Europe. We know less, however, about discrimination in informal and unstructured everyday encounters. To address this gap, we report results from a large-scale field experiment examining the physical avoidance of immigrants as an unobtrusive yet important measure of everyday discrimination in a mult…
Partisan Joiners: Associational Membership and Political Polarization in the United States (1974–2004)
Objectives. Associational life may foster political integration or amplify division, depending on how individuals partition themselves into groups and whether their multiple affiliations embed them into concentric or cross‐cutting social circles. Starting from this premise, I relate trends in associational membership to political partisanship, and ask if there is any evidence of increased political polarization in the associative patterns of Amer…
Voter heuristics and political cognition in Italy: An empirical typology
Does Poverty Undermine Cooperation in Multiethnic Settings? Evidence from a Cooperative Investment Experiment
What undermines cooperation in ethnically diverse communities? Scholars have focused on factors that explain the lack of inter-ethnic cooperation, such as prejudice or the difficulty to communicate and sanction across group boundaries. We direct attention to the fact that diverse communities are also often poor and ask whether poverty, rather than diversity, reduces cooperation. We developed a strategic cooperation game where we vary the income a…
Immigration, integration and cooperation: Experimental evidence from a public goods game in Italy
Immigration has rapidly changed the demographic profile of most Western European societies, increasing their ethnic diversity. Some cross-disciplinary literature comparing homogeneous and diverse communities provides observational evidence of a link between high levels of ethnoracial diversity and lower levels of public goods provision. While these results are often interpreted as driven by context/interaction effects, whereby individuals lower t…
Greater Diversity or Fewer Whites? Disentangling Heterogeneity and Marginalized Group Share at Macro and Micro Levels
Scholarship claims that diversity undermines trust and cooperation. Critiques focus on studies' inability to discern diversity's causal effects. In fact, most studies are unable to distinguish diversity (i.e., mixture) and marginalized group share (e.g., percentage Black). The authors argue for preserving this distinction and identify obstacles to doing so. First, homogeneously disadvantaged communities are acutely underrepresented in North Ameri…
Partisanship Meets Social Networks: How Politically Heterogeneous Acquaintances and Close Relationships Buffer Partisan Animosity
Politically heterogeneous social networks have long been considered as a safeguard against political division. However, in today’s polarized political climate, the effectiveness of cross-partisan interactions in mitigating animosity is increasingly questioned. Prior research emphasizes the importance of hearing-the-other-side through cross-partisan discussions with close ties. We confirm that these discussions still take place and are related to …
Prosociality Beyond In-Group Boundaries: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment on Selection and Intergroup Interactions in a Multiethnic European Metropolis
How does prosocial behavior extend beyond in-group boundaries in multiethnic societies? The differentiation of Western societies presents an opportunity to understand the tension between societal pressures that push people outside the comfort zones of their familiar networks to constructively interact with unknown diverse others and the tendency toward homophily and in-group favoritism. We introduce a three-step model of out-group exposure that i…
Voter heuristics and political cognition in Italy: An empirical typology
The Social Logic of Politics: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior
Dynamics of Political Polarization
This article accounts for two puzzling paradoxes. The first paradox is the simultaneous absence and presence of attitude polarization-the fact that global attitude polarization is relatively rare, even though pundits describe it as common. The second paradox is the simultaneous presence and absence of social polarization-the fact that while individuals experience attitude homogeneity in their interpersonal networks, their networks are characteriz…
The Integrative Power of Civic Networks
This article analyzes integrative dynamics within civil society by looking at civic networks—the web of collaborative ties between participatory associations acting on behalf of public and collective interests. Drawing upon evidence from Glasgow and Bristol, the authors identify a polycentric model of civic coordination based on horizontal solidarity, in which associations form dense clusters of strong identity ties (“social bonds”) bridged by fe…
Partisans without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion
Public opinion polarization is here conceived as a process of alignment along multiple lines of potential disagreement and measured as growing constraint in individuals' preferences. Using NES data from 1972 to 2004, the authors model trends in issue partisanship—the correlation of issue attitudes with party identification—and issue alignment—the correlation between pairs of issues—and find a substantive increase in issue partisanship, but little…
Matching
This article examines matching processes, specifically two-sided matching contexts such as marriage and job markets, using an agent-based simulation approach. It begins with a conceptual discussion of matching processes, focusing on four key analytic features that define a matching process: the preferences actors have over characteristics (of alters or of pairings); the distribution of (relevant) characteristics in the population; the information…
Partisan Joiners: Associational Membership and Political Polarization in the United States (1974–2004)
Objectives. Associational life may foster political integration or amplify division, depending on how individuals partition themselves into groups and whether their multiple affiliations embed them into concentric or cross‐cutting social circles. Starting from this premise, I relate trends in associational membership to political partisanship, and ask if there is any evidence of increased political polarization in the associative patterns of Amer…
Cultural Anchors and the Organization of Differences: A Multi-method Analysis of LGBT Marches on Washington
Social scientists describe culture as either coherent or incoherent and political dissent as either unifying or divisive. This article moves beyond such dichotomies. Content, historical, and network analyses of public debates on how to organize four lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Washington marches provide evidence for an integrative position. Rather than just describe consistencies or contradictions, we contend that the key analy…
The Simple Art of Voting: The Cognitive Shortcuts of Italian Voters
Voting distills a complex decision into a deceptively simple action. The electorate faces a messy tangle of parties, leaders, and issues. How is it possible for voters to unravel it all? How do they perceive the political landscape? How, in short, do voters choose? Not only is voting a complex choice, but voters themselves also vary widely in their degree of interest, and involvement in politics. This book provides a new understanding of how voti…
The Impact of Elections on Cooperation: Evidence from a Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiment in Uganda
Communities often rely on sanctioning to induce public goods contributions. Past studies focus on how external agencies or peer sanctioning induce cooperation. In this article, we focus instead on the role played by centralized authorities, internal to the community. Combining “lab‐in‐the‐field” experiments with observational data on 1,541 Ugandan farmers from 50 communities, we demonstrate the positive effect of internal centralized sanctioning …
Neither Ideologues nor Agnostics: Alternative Voters' Belief System in an Age of Partisan Politics
How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This article argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americans. The article investigates systematic heterogeneity in the organization of political attitudes using relational class analysis, a graph-based method for detecting multiple patterns of opinion in survey data. Three subpopulation…
Breaking Down the State: Protestors Engaged
Recent years have seen an explosion of protest movements around the world, and academic theories are racing to catch up with them. This series aims to further our understanding of the origins, dealings, decisions, and outcomes of social movements by fostering dialogue among many traditions of thought, across European nations and across continents. All theoretical perspectives are welcome. Books in the series typically combine theory with empirica…
Heuristics, Interactions, and Status Hierarchies: An Agent-based Model of Deference Exchange
Since Merton's classical analysis of cumulative advantage in science, it has been observed that status hierarchies display a sizable disconnect between actors' quality and rank and that they become increasingly asymmetric over time, without, however, turning into winner-take-all structures. In recent years, formal models of status hierarchies tried to account for these facts by combining two micro-level, counterbalancing mechanisms: 'social influ…
Love Thy Neighbor? Ethnoracial Diversity and Trust Reexamined
According to recent research, ethnoracial diversity negatively affects trust and social capital. This article challenges the current conception and measurement of "diversity" and invites scholars to rethink "so-cial capital" in complex societies. It reproduces the analysis of Putnam and shows that the association between diversity and self-reported trust is a compositional artifact attributable to residential sorting: non-whites report lower trus…
Cooperative Networks: Altruism, Group Solidarity, Reciprocity, and Sanctioning in Ugandan Producer Organizations
Repeated interaction and social networks are commonly considered viable solutions to collective action problems. This article identifies and systematically measures four general mechanisms--that is, generalized altruism, group solidarity, reciprocity, and the threat of sanctioning--and tests which of them brings about cooperation in the context of Ugandan producer organizations. Using an innovative methodological framework that combines "lab-in-t…
It could turn ugly: Selective disclosure of attitudes in political discussion networks
Field Experiments Across the Social Sciences
Using field experiments, scholars can identify causal effects via randomization while studying people and groups in their naturally occurring contexts. In light of renewed interest in field experimental methods, this review covers a wide range of field experiments from across the social sciences, with an eye to those that adopt virtuous practices, including unobtrusive measurement, naturalistic interventions, attention to realistic outcomes and c…
Does Poverty Undermine Cooperation in Multiethnic Settings? Evidence from a Cooperative Investment Experiment
What undermines cooperation in ethnically diverse communities? Scholars have focused on factors that explain the lack of inter-ethnic cooperation, such as prejudice or the difficulty to communicate and sanction across group boundaries. We direct attention to the fact that diverse communities are also often poor and ask whether poverty, rather than diversity, reduces cooperation. We developed a strategic cooperation game where we vary the income a…
Diversity and prosocial behavior
Immigration and globalization have spurred interest in the effects of ethnic diversity in Western societies. Most scholars focus on whether diversity undermines trust, social capital, and collective goods provision. However, the type of prosociality that helps heterogeneous societies function is different from the in-group solidarity that glues homogeneous communities together. Social cohesion in multiethnic societies depends on whether prosocial…
Gendered Discrimination Against Immigrants: Experimental Evidence
Recent migration from Muslim-majority countries has sparked discussions across Europe about the supposed threat posed by new immigrants. Young men make up the largest share of newly arrived immigrants and this demographic is often perceived to be particularly threatening. In this article, we compare pro-sociality and trust toward immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, focusing on gender differences in treatment. We study these questions using…
Was There a Culture War? Partisan Polarization and Secular Trends in US Public Opinion
According to many scholars of public opinion, most of the fast-growing divides between Democrats and Republicans over the last few decades have taken place on moral issues. We find that the process of issue partisanship—the sorting of political preferences along partisan lines—properly accounts for public opinion dynamics in the economic and civil rights domains. However, when it comes to moral issues, the prominent change is a partisan secular t…
The Microrelations of Urban Governance: Dynamics of Patronage and Partnership
The classic urban ecological paradigm envisioned the articulation of the social organization of neighborhoods with that of the city as a whole. This article offers novel empirical evidence in support of this proposition. We analyze the microrelations of governance across two key urban domains, politics and nonprofit organizations, and identify the district-based politician as a key actor linking neighborhood-based and citywide forms of social org…
Strangers in Hostile Lands: Exposure to Refugees and Right-Wing Support in Germany’s Eastern Regions
Does local exposure to refugees increase right-wing support? This paper studies a case uniquely suited to address this question: the allocation of refugees to the rural hinterlands of eastern Germany during the European refugee crisis. Similar to non-urban regions elsewhere, the area has had minimal previous exposure to foreigners, but distinctively leans towards the political right. Our data comprise electoral outcomes, and individual-level surv…
Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts
Immigration, integration and cooperation: Experimental evidence from a public goods game in Italy
Immigration has rapidly changed the demographic profile of most Western European societies, increasing their ethnic diversity. Some cross-disciplinary literature comparing homogeneous and diverse communities provides observational evidence of a link between high levels of ethnoracial diversity and lower levels of public goods provision. While these results are often interpreted as driven by context/interaction effects, whereby individuals lower t…
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Social Psychology (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Economics (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (10 works)