Dominik Hangartner
Biographic Data
| ID | 922249 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dominik Hangartner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dominik |
| FAMILY NAME | Hangartner |
| SIGNATURE | HANGARTNER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | ETH Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4511-7507 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1099 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Improving hate speech detection with large language models
Efforts to curb online hate speech depend on our ability to reliably detect it at scale. Previous studies have highlighted the strong zero-shot classification performance of large language models (LLMs), offering a potential tool to efficiently identify harmful content. Yet for complex and ambivalent tasks like hate speech detection, pre-trained LLMs can be insufficient and carry systemic biases. Domain-specific models fine-tuned for the given ta…
Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in 15 Destination Countries
Welcome to France.” Can mandatory integration contracts foster immigrant integration
European governments, struggling with incorporating diverse immigrant populations, introduced integration contracts. Through language training and compulsory civics courses, these contracts aim to induce new migrants to adopt the host society's culture, respect its values, and improve their labor market outcomes. Despite their popularity, little empirical evidence exists on whether integration contracts catalyze integration or trigger a backlash.…
The distribution of hate speech and its implications for content moderation
Hate speech is widely seen as a significant obstacle to constructive online discourse, but the most effective strategies to mitigate its effects remain unclear. We claim that understanding its distribution across users is key to developing and evaluating effective content moderation strategies. We address this missing link by first examining the distribution of hate speech in five original datasets that collect user-generated posts across multipl…
Inferring Individual Preferences from Group Decisions: Judicial Preference Variation and Aggregation on Collegial Courts
Extensive research on judicial politics has documented disparities in adjudication and biases in judging. Yet, lacking statistical methods to infer individual preferences from group decisions, existing studies have focused on courts publishing individual judges’ opinions, leaving a gap in understanding collegial courts that report only collective and unanimous (‘per curiam’) panel decisions. We introduce a statistical methodology to identify the …
Reducing attrition in phone-based panel surveys: Best Practices and Semi-Automation for Survey Workflows
Panel surveys and phone-based data collection are essential for survey research and are often used together due to the practical advantages of conducting repeated interviews over the phone. These tools are particularly critical for research in dynamic or high-risk settings, as highlighted by researchers’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, preventing high attrition is a major challenge in panel surveys. Current solutions in political sci…
When Can We Trust Regression Discontinuity Design Estimates from Close Elections? Evidence from Experimental Benchmarks
Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used in the social sciences to estimate causal effects from observational data. Following recent methodological advances, scholars can choose from various RDD estimators for point estimation and inference. This decision is mainly guided by theoretical results on optimality and Monte Carlo simulations because of a paucity of research on the performance of the different estimators in recovering real…
The impact of private hosting on the integration of Ukrainian refugees in Germany
Amid the Ukrainian displacement crisis, private hosting of refugees in Europe has surged, yet its impact on integration remains understudied. This research examines the short- to medium-term effects of private hosting on Ukrainian refugee integration in Germany. Using data from one of the largest non-profit platforms that matches private hosts with refugees, we compare the multidimensional integration outcomes of refugees who were matched with pr…
The Free Movement of People and the Success of Far-Right Parties: Evidence from Switzerland's Border Liberalization
The main theories explaining electoral backlash against immigration focus on citizens' cultural, economic, and security concerns. We test these predictions in Switzerland, which opened its labor market to neighboring countries in the 2000s. Employing a difference-in-differences design, we document a substantial rise in immigrant workers in Swiss border municipalities after the border opened. This was accompanied by a 6-percentage-point (95% confi…
Optimal multi‐action treatment allocation: A two‐phase field experiment to boost immigrant naturalization
Research underscores the role of naturalization in enhancing immigrants' socio‐economic integration, yet application rates remain low. We estimate a policy rule for a letter‐based information campaign encouraging newly eligible immigrants in Zurich, Switzerland, to naturalize. The policy rule assigns one out of three treatment letters to each individual, based on their observed characteristics. We field the policy rule to one‐half of 1717 immigra…
Cash-based interventions improve multidimensional integration outcomes of Venezuelan immigrants
Since 2015, over 7 million Venezuelans have been forced to leave their homes, seeking refuge predominantly in neighboring countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. The displacement is typically accompanied by vulnerability and marginalization, yet there is a scarcity of actionable evidence on how to alleviate poverty among immigrants and refugees and facilitate their economic, political, and social integration. This study evaluates the im…
The Effect of Fox News on Health Behavior during Covid-19
In the early weeks of the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the Fox News Channel advanced a skeptical narrative that downplayed the risks posed by the virus. We find that this narrative had significant consequences: in localities with higher Fox News viewership—exogenous due to random variation in channel positioning—people were less likely to adopt behaviors geared toward social distancing (e.g., staying at home) and consumed fewer goods in …
Do Immigrants Move to Welfare? Subnational Evidence from Switzerland
The welfare magnet hypothesis holds that immigrants are likely to relocate to regions with generous welfare benefits. Although this assumption has motivated extensive reforms to immigration policy and social programs, the empirical evidence remains contested. In this study, we assess detailed administrative records from Switzerland covering the full population of social assistance recipients between 2005 and 2015. By leveraging local variations i…
Learning from Null Effects: A Bottom-Up Approach
A critical barrier to generating cumulative knowledge in political science and related disciplines is the inability of researchers to observe the results from the full set of research designs that scholars have conceptualized, implemented, and analyzed. For a variety of reasons, studies that produce null findings are especially likely to be unobserved, creating biases in publicly accessible research. While several approaches have been suggested t…
The Dynamics of Refugee Return: Syrian Refugees and Their Migration Intentions
We study the drivers of refugees' decision making about returning home using observational and experimental data from a survey of 3,003 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We find that the conditions in refugee-hosting countries play a minor role. In contrast, conditions in a refugee's home country are the main drivers of return intentions. Even in the face of hostility and poor living conditions in host countries, refugees are unlikely to return unless …
Using Eye-Tracking to Understand Decision-Making in Conjoint Experiments
Conjoint experiments are popular, but there is a paucity of research on respondents’ underlying decision-making processes. We leverage eye-tracking methodology and a series of conjoint experiments, administered to university students and local community members, to examine how respondents process information in conjoint surveys. There are two main findings. First, attribute importance measures inferred from the stated choice data are correlated w…
Attitudes Toward Migrants in a Highly Impacted Economy: Evidence From the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan
With international migration at a record high, a burgeoning literature has explored the drivers of public attitudes toward migrants. However, most studies to date have focused on developed countries, which have relatively fewer migrants and more capacity to absorb them. We address this sample bias by conducting a survey of public attitudes toward Syrians in Jordan, a developing country with one of the largest shares of refugees. Our analysis indi…
Profiling Compliers and Noncompliers for Instrumental-Variable Analysis
Instrumental-variable (IV) estimation is an essential method for applied researchers across the social and behavioral sciences who analyze randomized control trials marred by noncompliance or leverage partially exogenous treatment variation in observational studies. The potential outcome framework is a popular model to motivate the assumptions underlying the identification of the local average treatment effect (LATE) and to stratify the sample in…
Ethnic networks can foster the economic integration of refugees
There is widespread concern in Europe and other refugee-receiving continents that living in an enclave of coethnics hinders refugees’ economic and social integration. Several European governments have adopted policies to geographically disperse refugees. While many theoretical arguments and descriptive studies analyze the impact of spatially concentrated ethnic networks on immigrant integration, there is limited causal evidence that sheds light o…
Waking Up the Golden Dawn: Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Increase Support for Extreme-Right Parties
Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel support for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little—and sometimes conflicting—evidence with which to assess the impact of a large influx of refugees on natives’ political attitudes and behavior. We provide causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish borde…
Does Direct Democracy Hurt Immigrant Minorities? Evidence from Naturalization Decisions in Switzerland
Do minorities fare worse under direct democracy than under representative democracy? We provide new evidence by studying naturalization requests of immigrants in Switzerland that were typically decided with referendums in each municipality. Using panel data from about 1,400 municipalities for the 1991–2009 period, we exploit Federal Court rulings that forced municipalities to transfer the decisions to their elected municipality councils. We find …
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did…
Multidimensional measure of immigrant integration
The successful integration of immigrants into a host country’s society, economy, and polity has become a major issue for policymakers in recent decades. Scientific progress in the study of immigrant integration has been hampered by the lack of a common measure of integration, which would allow for the accumulation of knowledge through comparison across studies, countries, and time. To address this fundamental problem, we propose the Immigration P…
The long-term impact of employment bans on the economic integration of refugees
Temporary employment bans for asylum seekers have lasting negative consequences for their economic integration.
Compulsory Voting, Habit Formation, and Political Participation
Can electoral institutions induce lasting changes in citizens’ voting habits? We study the long-term and spillover effects of compulsory voting in the Swiss canton of Vaud (1900–1970) and find that this intervention increases turnout in federal referendums by 30 percentage points. However, despite its magnitude, the effect disappears quickly after voting is no longer compulsory. We find minor spillover effects on related forms of political partic…
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did…
Who Gets a Swiss Passport? A Natural Experiment in Immigrant Discrimination
We study discrimination against immigrants using microlevel data from Switzerland, where, until recently, some municipalities used referendums to decide on the citizenship applications of foreign residents. We show that naturalization decisions vary dramatically with immigrants' attributes, which we collect from official applicant descriptions that voters received before each referendum. Country of origin determines naturalization success more th…
Waking Up the Golden Dawn: Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Increase Support for Extreme-Right Parties
Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel support for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little—and sometimes conflicting—evidence with which to assess the impact of a large influx of refugees on natives’ political attitudes and behavior. We provide causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish borde…
Catalyst or Crown: Does Naturalization Promote the Long-Term Social Integration of Immigrants
We study the impact of naturalization on the long-term social integration of immigrants into the host country society. Despite ongoing debates about citizenship policy, we lack reliable evidence that isolates the causal effect of naturalization from the nonrandom selection into naturalization. We exploit the quasi-random assignment of citizenship in Swiss municipalities that used referendums to decide on naturalization applications of immigrants.…
Attitudes Toward Migrants in a Highly Impacted Economy: Evidence From the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan
With international migration at a record high, a burgeoning literature has explored the drivers of public attitudes toward migrants. However, most studies to date have focused on developed countries, which have relatively fewer migrants and more capacity to absorb them. We address this sample bias by conducting a survey of public attitudes toward Syrians in Jordan, a developing country with one of the largest shares of refugees. Our analysis indi…
Does Compulsory Voting Increase Support for Leftist Policy
Citizens unequally participate in referendums, and this may systematically bias policy in favor of those who vote. Some view compulsory voting as an important tool to alleviate this problem, whereas others worry about its detrimental effects on the legitimacy and quality of democratic decision making. So far, however, we lack systematic knowledge about the causal effect of compulsory voting on public policy. We argue that sanctioned compulsory vo…
Using Eye-Tracking to Understand Decision-Making in Conjoint Experiments
Conjoint experiments are popular, but there is a paucity of research on respondents’ underlying decision-making processes. We leverage eye-tracking methodology and a series of conjoint experiments, administered to university students and local community members, to examine how respondents process information in conjoint surveys. There are two main findings. First, attribute importance measures inferred from the stated choice data are correlated w…
When Deliberative Theory Meets Empirical Political Science: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Political Deliberation
Re-linking deliberative theory with empirical political science has become a major theme in the discipline. But when philosophical concepts are to be integrated into positive political science, researchers confront both theoretical and methodological challenges. Focusing on deliberative democracy, a major theoretical challenge is the practical implementation of deliberative ideals. Comparative scholars have explored institutional contexts that fa…
Reality Bites: The Limits of Framing Effects for Salient and Contested Policy Issues
A large literature argues that public opinion is vulnerable to various types of framing and cue effects. However, we lack evidence on whether existing findings, which are typically based on lab experiments involving low-salience issues, travel to salient and contentious political issues in real-world voting situations. We examine the relative importance of issue frames, partisan cues, and their interaction for opinion formation using a survey exp…
Europeans support a proportional allocation of asylum seekers
Does Direct Democracy Hurt Immigrant Minorities? Evidence from Naturalization Decisions in Switzerland
Do minorities fare worse under direct democracy than under representative democracy? We provide new evidence by studying naturalization requests of immigrants in Switzerland that were typically decided with referendums in each municipality. Using panel data from about 1,400 municipalities for the 1991–2009 period, we exploit Federal Court rulings that forced municipalities to transfer the decisions to their elected municipality councils. We find …
The Dynamics of Refugee Return: Syrian Refugees and Their Migration Intentions
We study the drivers of refugees' decision making about returning home using observational and experimental data from a survey of 3,003 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We find that the conditions in refugee-hosting countries play a minor role. In contrast, conditions in a refugee's home country are the main drivers of return intentions. Even in the face of hostility and poor living conditions in host countries, refugees are unlikely to return unless …
Profiling Compliers and Noncompliers for Instrumental-Variable Analysis
Instrumental-variable (IV) estimation is an essential method for applied researchers across the social and behavioral sciences who analyze randomized control trials marred by noncompliance or leverage partially exogenous treatment variation in observational studies. The potential outcome framework is a popular model to motivate the assumptions underlying the identification of the local average treatment effect (LATE) and to stratify the sample in…
Learning from Null Effects: A Bottom-Up Approach
A critical barrier to generating cumulative knowledge in political science and related disciplines is the inability of researchers to observe the results from the full set of research designs that scholars have conceptualized, implemented, and analyzed. For a variety of reasons, studies that produce null findings are especially likely to be unobserved, creating biases in publicly accessible research. While several approaches have been suggested t…
Open/Closed List and Party Choice: Experimental Evidence from the UK
Which parties benefit from open-list (as opposed to closed-list) proportional representation elections? This article shows that a move from closed-list to open-list competition is likely to be more favorable to parties with more internal disagreement on salient issues; this is because voters who might have voted for a unified party under closed lists may be drawn to specific candidates within internally divided parties under open lists. The study…
Comparing Candidates and Citizens in the Ideological Space
Little is known about the ideological relationship between the Swiss political elite and the general public. Based on the Selects 2007 candidate and voter surveys, we compare the value orientations of both groups by applying ordinal factor analysis. First, we test whether political leaders or their supporters are more ideologically polarized. Second, we investigate whether ideological congruency between the electorate and representatives varies f…
The Effect of Fox News on Health Behavior during Covid-19
In the early weeks of the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the Fox News Channel advanced a skeptical narrative that downplayed the risks posed by the virus. We find that this narrative had significant consequences: in localities with higher Fox News viewership—exogenous due to random variation in channel positioning—people were less likely to adopt behaviors geared toward social distancing (e.g., staying at home) and consumed fewer goods in …
Patterns of Parliamentary Discourse: How ‘Deliberative’ are German Legislative Debates
An under-researched topic in German politics is the systematic assessment of the nature and quality of its political discourse. Since absolute standards of high and low discourse quality are difficult to establish, we explore discourse quality – defined in deliberative terms as more or less respect – in a comparative fashion by contrasting the German Bundestag with the Swiss Nationalrat. We find that the government–opposition setting in Germany d…
Do Immigrants Move to Welfare? Subnational Evidence from Switzerland
The welfare magnet hypothesis holds that immigrants are likely to relocate to regions with generous welfare benefits. Although this assumption has motivated extensive reforms to immigration policy and social programs, the empirical evidence remains contested. In this study, we assess detailed administrative records from Switzerland covering the full population of social assistance recipients between 2005 and 2015. By leveraging local variations i…
Circular Data in Political Science and How to Handle It
There has been no attention to circular (purely cyclical) data in political science research. We show that such data exist and are mishandled by models that do not take into account the inherently recycling nature of some phenomenon. Clock and calendar effects are the obvious cases, but directional data are observed as well. We describe a standard maximum likelihood regression modeling framework based on the von Mises distribution, then develop a…
Mixing Habermas with Bayes: Methodological and Theoretical Advances in the Study of Deliberation
Two challenges stand out in the study of deliberation: the development of appropriate methodological tools and the development of more unified analytical frameworks. On the one hand, analysing deliberative processes is demanding and time‐consuming; hence we tend to have only few and non‐randomly selected cases at the group or context level. In addition, the real world of deliberation presents us with a complex matrix of nested, cross‐classified, …
The Free Movement of People and the Success of Far-Right Parties: Evidence from Switzerland's Border Liberalization
The main theories explaining electoral backlash against immigration focus on citizens' cultural, economic, and security concerns. We test these predictions in Switzerland, which opened its labor market to neighboring countries in the 2000s. Employing a difference-in-differences design, we document a substantial rise in immigrant workers in Swiss border municipalities after the border opened. This was accompanied by a 6-percentage-point (95% confi…
Soziale Netzwerke und beruflicher Erfolg: Eine Analyse des Arbeitsmarkteintritts von Hochschulabsolventen
When Can We Trust Regression Discontinuity Design Estimates from Close Elections? Evidence from Experimental Benchmarks
Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used in the social sciences to estimate causal effects from observational data. Following recent methodological advances, scholars can choose from various RDD estimators for point estimation and inference. This decision is mainly guided by theoretical results on optimality and Monte Carlo simulations because of a paucity of research on the performance of the different estimators in recovering real…
The impact of private hosting on the integration of Ukrainian refugees in Germany
Amid the Ukrainian displacement crisis, private hosting of refugees in Europe has surged, yet its impact on integration remains understudied. This research examines the short- to medium-term effects of private hosting on Ukrainian refugee integration in Germany. Using data from one of the largest non-profit platforms that matches private hosts with refugees, we compare the multidimensional integration outcomes of refugees who were matched with pr…
Soziale Netzwerke und beruflicher Erfolg: Eine Analyse des Arbeitsmarkteintritts von Hochschulabsolventen
Size Does Matter. Körpergröße, Humankapital und Einkommen
SozW Soziale Welt , Seite 273 - 294
Mixing Habermas with Bayes: Methodological and Theoretical Advances in the Study of Deliberation
Two challenges stand out in the study of deliberation: the development of appropriate methodological tools and the development of more unified analytical frameworks. On the one hand, analysing deliberative processes is demanding and time‐consuming; hence we tend to have only few and non‐randomly selected cases at the group or context level. In addition, the real world of deliberation presents us with a complex matrix of nested, cross‐classified, …
Patterns of Parliamentary Discourse: How ‘Deliberative’ are German Legislative Debates
An under-researched topic in German politics is the systematic assessment of the nature and quality of its political discourse. Since absolute standards of high and low discourse quality are difficult to establish, we explore discourse quality – defined in deliberative terms as more or less respect – in a comparative fashion by contrasting the German Bundestag with the Swiss Nationalrat. We find that the government–opposition setting in Germany d…
Die Untersuchung verborgener Populationen: Eine Capture-Recapture-Studie mit Heroinabhängigen / Investigating Hidden Populations: A Capture-Recapture Study of Heroin Addicts
Der vorliegende Artikel schätzt den Umfang einer Population von Konsumenten harter Drogen in Zürich. Da diese Population nur schwer zugänglich ist, gestaltet sich bereits die Schätzung ihrer Größe schwierig. Anhand eines von uns durchgeführten Surveys erhoben wir mehrere Teilstichproben. Aus dem Verhältnis der Stichprobengrößen und der Schnittmenge der mehrfach erfassten Individuen lässt sich die Populationsgröße ableiten. Wir erweitern dieses ei…
When Deliberative Theory Meets Empirical Political Science: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Political Deliberation
Re-linking deliberative theory with empirical political science has become a major theme in the discipline. But when philosophical concepts are to be integrated into positive political science, researchers confront both theoretical and methodological challenges. Focusing on deliberative democracy, a major theoretical challenge is the practical implementation of deliberative ideals. Comparative scholars have explored institutional contexts that fa…
Circular Data in Political Science and How to Handle It
There has been no attention to circular (purely cyclical) data in political science research. We show that such data exist and are mishandled by models that do not take into account the inherently recycling nature of some phenomenon. Clock and calendar effects are the obvious cases, but directional data are observed as well. We describe a standard maximum likelihood regression modeling framework based on the von Mises distribution, then develop a…
Comparing Candidates and Citizens in the Ideological Space
Little is known about the ideological relationship between the Swiss political elite and the general public. Based on the Selects 2007 candidate and voter surveys, we compare the value orientations of both groups by applying ordinal factor analysis. First, we test whether political leaders or their supporters are more ideologically polarized. Second, we investigate whether ideological congruency between the electorate and representatives varies f…
Religious reasons in the public sphere: An empirical study of religious actors’ argumentative patterns in Swiss direct democratic campaigns
The ‘going public’ of religious actors is taking central stage both in religious studies and political philosophy. But this ‘going public’ of religious actors is controversial. The debate revolves around the question of whether religious actors must frame their religious convictions in terms of secular reasons or whether they should be allowed to introduce religiously grounded beliefs into public political argument without constraints. Despite vi…
Who Gets a Swiss Passport? A Natural Experiment in Immigrant Discrimination
We study discrimination against immigrants using microlevel data from Switzerland, where, until recently, some municipalities used referendums to decide on the citizenship applications of foreign residents. We show that naturalization decisions vary dramatically with immigrants' attributes, which we collect from official applicant descriptions that voters received before each referendum. Country of origin determines naturalization success more th…
Naturalization fosters the long-term political integration of immigrants
Significance The political integration of immigrant minorities is one of the most pressing policy issues many countries face today. Despite heated debates, there exists little rigorous evidence about whether naturalization fosters or dampens the integration of immigrants into the political fabric of the host society. Our study provides new causal evidence on the long-term effects of naturalization on political integration. Our research design tak…
Validating vignette and conjoint survey experiments against real-world behavior
Significance Little evidence exists on whether preferences about hypothetical choices measured in a survey experiment are driven by the same structural determinants of the actual choices made in the real world. This study answers this question using a natural experiment as a behavioral benchmark. Comparing the results from conjoint and vignette experiments on which attributes of hypothetical immigrants generate support for naturalization with the…
Reality Bites: The Limits of Framing Effects for Salient and Contested Policy Issues
A large literature argues that public opinion is vulnerable to various types of framing and cue effects. However, we lack evidence on whether existing findings, which are typically based on lab experiments involving low-salience issues, travel to salient and contentious political issues in real-world voting situations. We examine the relative importance of issue frames, partisan cues, and their interaction for opinion formation using a survey exp…
When lives are put on hold: Lengthy asylum processes decrease employment among refugees
Refugees waiting an additional year for their asylum claim decision face a 20% reduction in their subsequent employment rate.
Does Compulsory Voting Increase Support for Leftist Policy
Citizens unequally participate in referendums, and this may systematically bias policy in favor of those who vote. Some view compulsory voting as an important tool to alleviate this problem, whereas others worry about its detrimental effects on the legitimacy and quality of democratic decision making. So far, however, we lack systematic knowledge about the causal effect of compulsory voting on public policy. We argue that sanctioned compulsory vo…
Open/Closed List and Party Choice: Experimental Evidence from the UK
Which parties benefit from open-list (as opposed to closed-list) proportional representation elections? This article shows that a move from closed-list to open-list competition is likely to be more favorable to parties with more internal disagreement on salient issues; this is because voters who might have voted for a unified party under closed lists may be drawn to specific candidates within internally divided parties under open lists. The study…
Catalyst or Crown: Does Naturalization Promote the Long-Term Social Integration of Immigrants
We study the impact of naturalization on the long-term social integration of immigrants into the host country society. Despite ongoing debates about citizenship policy, we lack reliable evidence that isolates the causal effect of naturalization from the nonrandom selection into naturalization. We exploit the quasi-random assignment of citizenship in Swiss municipalities that used referendums to decide on naturalization applications of immigrants.…
Europeans support a proportional allocation of asylum seekers
Multidimensional measure of immigrant integration
The successful integration of immigrants into a host country’s society, economy, and polity has become a major issue for policymakers in recent decades. Scientific progress in the study of immigrant integration has been hampered by the lack of a common measure of integration, which would allow for the accumulation of knowledge through comparison across studies, countries, and time. To address this fundamental problem, we propose the Immigration P…
The long-term impact of employment bans on the economic integration of refugees
Temporary employment bans for asylum seekers have lasting negative consequences for their economic integration.
Compulsory Voting, Habit Formation, and Political Participation
Can electoral institutions induce lasting changes in citizens’ voting habits? We study the long-term and spillover effects of compulsory voting in the Swiss canton of Vaud (1900–1970) and find that this intervention increases turnout in federal referendums by 30 percentage points. However, despite its magnitude, the effect disappears quickly after voting is no longer compulsory. We find minor spillover effects on related forms of political partic…
Ethnic networks can foster the economic integration of refugees
There is widespread concern in Europe and other refugee-receiving continents that living in an enclave of coethnics hinders refugees’ economic and social integration. Several European governments have adopted policies to geographically disperse refugees. While many theoretical arguments and descriptive studies analyze the impact of spatially concentrated ethnic networks on immigrant integration, there is limited causal evidence that sheds light o…
Waking Up the Golden Dawn: Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Increase Support for Extreme-Right Parties
Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel support for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little—and sometimes conflicting—evidence with which to assess the impact of a large influx of refugees on natives’ political attitudes and behavior. We provide causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish borde…
Does Direct Democracy Hurt Immigrant Minorities? Evidence from Naturalization Decisions in Switzerland
Do minorities fare worse under direct democracy than under representative democracy? We provide new evidence by studying naturalization requests of immigrants in Switzerland that were typically decided with referendums in each municipality. Using panel data from about 1,400 municipalities for the 1991–2009 period, we exploit Federal Court rulings that forced municipalities to transfer the decisions to their elected municipality councils. We find …
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did…
Political science (31 works) · Economics (23 works) · Law (23 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Immigration (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (14 works) · Demographic economics (12 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works)