Refugee integration is a central policy challenge. Expanding on prior research on policy debates targeting immigrants, we examine whether host-country debates about military aid to refugees' homeland shape their psychological integration. In a survey experiment with 2,631 Ukrainian refugees in Germany, participants viewed authentic statements by German politicians expressing varying levels of support for military aid. On average, these messages had no detectable effect. Yet this null masks important heterogeneity. By linking our experiment to daily variation in national news coverage, we find that when conflict salience is low, exposure to any political statement on military aid—supportive or opposing—reduces psychological integration. These effects vanish when the issue is already prominent in the media. We argue that this pattern reflects a contestation mechanism: refugees interpret the very visibility of political debate, rather than its specific content, as a signal that host-country support is contested and potentially less secure.
Researchers often aim to disentangle naturally co-occuring attributes—such as race and country of origin—in order to evaluate their respective isolated effects. A prominent case is the debate in polarization research concerning the impact of partisanship and policy positions on affective evaluations. We contend that establishing an estimate of the isolated effect of party and policy is neither conceptually coherent nor empirically possible. This is because altering party or policy necessarily changes the interaction with the other attribute, especially in terms of atypicality—the extent to which party-policy combinations violate stereotype-based expectations. Using two pre-registered conjoint experiments, we demonstrate that atypical combinations trigger systematic evaluative penalties. Moreover, atypicality sharply alters the estimated marginal effects of both party and policy. We show how this challenge extends to other fields of study. Rather than attempting to separate the inseparable, we urge scholars to focus on how linked variables jointly drive evaluations.
Local governments face a core dilemma in infrastructure planning: siting production near borders reduces residents' exposure to negative externalities but risks channeling jobs to non-resident in-commuters who pay taxes and vote elsewhere. I develop a formal model predicting that local governments can mitigate this tradeoff by shaping relative connectivity through the strategic development of transportation infrastructure. By underinvesting in border-area roads while maintaining strong links to residential centers, municipalities tilt employment toward voting residents while pushing production out of municipal cores. Political competition amplifies the resulting infrastructure gradient by forcing office-seeking politicians to focus on short-term voter demands rather than long-term efficiency. I test these predictions using data on road networks along 32,000 German municipal borders paired with high-resolution commuter flow data, showing that (1) road density falls systematically toward borders, (2) the decline is steeper where in-commuting is high, and (3) electoral competition magnifies this effect. The results highlight how electoral incentives and institutional design distort the geography of public goods, creating "missing roads" at jurisdictional boundaries and fragmenting regional labor markets.
Misinformation remains a global threat to public health and democratic governance, yet research continues to disproportionately focus on highly connected, Western contexts. This paper asks: under what conditions do individuals share false information in largely offline environments? To address this question, we conducted a large-scale, in-person vignette-based conjoint experiment with nearly 6,000 adolescents across 583 villages in Bihar, India, a setting characterized by limited internet access and high exposure to misinformation. Respondents evaluated randomized information scenarios varying in veracity, transmitter identity, social endorsement, source, and topic, using a forced-choice design to simulate real-world oral information sharing. We find, first, that even without explicit veracity cues, respondents place a premium on truthfulness: true information is significantly more likely to be shared than false information. Second, ethnic and religious identity powerfully shape sharing behavior: Muslim transmitters are penalized even when sharing true information, whereas Hindu transmitters are judged more by the accuracy of the message. These results highlight how offline information sharing is shaped not only by content but also by social group dynamics. The findings underscore the importance of expanding misinformation research to low-connectivity populations and demonstrate methodological innovations for adapting experimental designs to offline, face-to-face environments.
How does national identification influence preferences for government-led redistribution? Existing theories propose competing predictions: some argue that heightened national identity reduces support for redistribution by prioritizing national interests over class-based ones, while others suggest that national identity fosters social solidarity and trust in reciprocity, enhancing support for redistributive policies. We use survey data from the European Social Survey (2002–2023) and the quasi-exogenous timing of international football matches as shocks to national identification to bring causal evidence to this debate. Using instrumental variable (IV) and regression discontinuity (RDD) designs, we show that heightened national identification increases support for redistribution. Mechanism analyses suggest that stronger national identity narrows the sense of who deserves assistance to fellow citizens, strengthening in-group solidarity but sharpening exclusion of outsiders. Our results imply that nation-building cues can raise support for redistribution within national borders even as they risk reinforcing exclusionary preferences in an unequal and diverse society.
This paper investigates the impact of Egyptian diaspora activism in Germany on raising awareness of human rights issues in Egypt by linking them to climate change debates around COP27. It compares newspaper coverage of Egypt in Germany, which hosts an active Egyptian diaspora engaged in transnational activism, to coverage in Austria, which has a much smaller Egyptian immigrant population without an equivalent protest movement. Leveraging an original dataset of over 4,000 newspaper articles from September 2021 to December 2022, the analysis examines issue linkage between climate change and human rights and the use of human rights frames in both countries' media. The results provide suggestive evidence that German coverage increasingly linked COP27 and Egyptian human rights and used rights framing more frequently as compared to Austria after protests by diaspora activists focused on these issues began. However, no clear differences emerge in sentiment regarding Egypt. Overall, the findings are consistent with prior scholarship on diaspora groups successfully leveraging host country media access and issue linkage with highly salient events like climate summits to raise the profile of homeland causes. This represents an important mechanism of transnational diaspora influence, but further research using causal identification strategies is needed for definitive claims. The paper concludes by discussing plans to extend the analysis to parliamentary discourse and refine the text analysis methods.