Join us next week!
On February 24, @gmelios.bsky.social (LSE) will present "Propaganda, party mobilisation and Electoral Oppression".
@felixhaass.bsky.social (Humboldt), @serkant.bsky.social (Sabancı), & @sofiavasilopoulou.bsky.social (@kingscollegelondon.bsky.social) will comment.
Really excited to present this work at @apsgworkshop.bsky.social, among a fantastic lineup of papers!
Read the full paper here 👉 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
And see the coverage by @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social:t.co/N4kE3L0mXl
Interpretation:
Well-designed, work-neutral disability benefits do not reduce labor market participation.
The small positive effects under strict assessors likely reflect filtering out strategic claims, not large behavioral responses.
📊 Results:
•Expanding access (mental health) → no reduction in employment, if anything small positive effects
•Restricting access (minor physical disabilities) → no gains in employment
•Stricter assessors → small but significant ↑ in employment
Using UK panel data (2009–2019) & quasi-experimental variation from the DLA→PIP reform, we estimate employment effects for:
•Mental health conditions (gained eligibility)
•Minor physical disabilities (lost eligibility)
•Regions with stricter vs lenient assessors
PIP is unique. It covers the extra costs of disability but has no earnings tests & no work incapacity requirements. This design lets us isolate pure income effects without substitution distortions.
Most disability benefits combine income support + work restrictions. That makes it hard to know: do people work less because they can, or because policy forces them not to?
🚨 New working paper alert!
As part of our Horizon Europe BENEFITS project, @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social and I study whether disability benefits necessarily discourage work — using the UK’s Personal Independence Payment (PIP) reform as a natural experiment.
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Takeaway: politics matters in private life—but signaling openness can bridge divides. Surfacing “tolerance” on platforms might reduce partisan sorting
Gender splits: Men penalized “progressive” profiles; women rewarded them. Women also showed a stronger in‑party preference than men
Counter‑stereotypes: Conservatives were more open to out‑partisans who defied stereotypes (e.g., White/Traditional/Non‑veg Labour). Labour respondents tended to prefer stereotypical Tories—except they liked progressive Tories
But tolerance is even stronger. Profiles saying “open to match with anyone” gained +19.9 pp—the largest effect; similar in size to being attractive. It’s not just avoiding “No Tories/No Labour” profiles. Even among co‑partisans, people preferred tolerant over intolerant profiles
Headline: Co‑partisanship is powerful. Co‑partisan profiles were picked +18.2 pp more often than out‑partisans
We ran a visual conjoint with 3,000 UK daters (18–40). Profiles varied party (Labour/Tory), a clear “tolerance” cue, ideology, race, education, diet, height, and facial attractiveness—using real photos to mirror apps
🚨📢 New paper out in @psrm.bsky.social with Yara Sleiman & Paul Dolan: “Sleeping with the enemy: partisanship and tolerance in online dating”. How much do politics shape who we swipe?
Just out! ERNOP's practitioner summary of my paper with @gmelios.bsky.social, showing that 🇺🇸 Partisans reduce charitable giving by ~4.5 % when their own party is in power, as faith in government crowds out private help, whereas opposition to government motivates private giving.
tinyurl.com/ernop1
An interesting collection of opinions @theguardian.com on whether and how the 2020 BLM protests change the world. Covers our work with @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social on @polbehavior.bsky.social. Link on the first comment
New paper out in @polbehavior.bsky.social. We focus on an important and timely question. Do protests matter? Do they drive social change? @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social summarises our work nicely in the following thread.
Great summary of our paper!
Very excited to be in Vienna yesterday for the kick-off meeting of our new Horizon Europe grant "MultiPod" on promoting political participation and creating the "Public Space for Citizen Deliberation" in Europe!
Check out our new publication. Excellently summarised by @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social
Thanks to @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social for the great collaboration on this project. Looking forward to continuing this line of research! #PoliticalScience #Polarization #AmericanPolitics
Why do these findings matter? A lack of trust in government when the "other side" is in power can hinder democratic functioning. It makes it harder for citizens to hold their own party accountable and can lead to efforts to undermine opposing governments. 🏛️
Why? Highly educated people show a stronger president-in-power effect, and they've increasingly shifted towards identifying as Democrats over time.
Citizen Erased: Contrary to popular belief, we found no evidence that this effect has grown faster among Republicans. If anything, it may have increased slightly more for Democrats in recent years.
Moreover, perceived ideological distance to the other side has increased:
Megalomania: The increase is driven by intensifying partisan identification:
