The Comparative Politics Seminar Series in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute is a venue for the presentation of work in progress by scholars from across the subfield of comparative politics.
It usually takes place on Thursdays from 17:00 to 18:30 at Seminar Room 2, in Badia Fiesolana (Fiesole). See below or sync the calendar for the exact location for each meeting. The event is in-person and on-line. Registration is required for online attendance. Attendance is generally restricted to members of the EUI community.
The series is organized by Elias Dinas, Miriam Golden, Simon Hix, and Filip Kostelka, with support by Daniel Urquijo and Pau Grau.
Thursday 05 October 2023 | Seminar Room 2
Which counterspeech strategy mitigates intergroup hostility and its amplification on social media? Evidence from a field experiment on the role of empathy (with Gloria Gennaro, UCL; Laurenz Derksen, ETH; Aya Abdelrahman, ETH; Emma Broggini, ETH; Mariya Alexandra Green, ETH; Victoria Andrea Haerter, ETH; Elia Heer, ETH; Isabel Heidler, ETH; Fiona Kauer, ETH; Han-Nuri Kim, ETH; Benjamin Landry, ETH; Alessio Levis, ETH; Jiazhen Li, UZH; Şevval Şimşir, ETH; Iva Srbinovska, ETH; Robin Anna Vital, ETH; Karsten Donnay, UZH; and Fabrizio Gilardi, UZH)
Online intergroup hostility is a pervasive and troubling issue, yet experimental evidence on how to curb it remains scarce. This study focuses on counterspeech as a means for users to reduce hate speech. Informed by theories from social psychology about the role of empathy in overcoming prejudice, we randomize four counterspeec strategies across the senders of 2,102 xenophobic Twitter messages. Compared to the control group, the three empathy-based strategies increase the sender’s propensity to delete the xenophobic message, reduce the share of new xenophobic messages over the following four weeks, and decrease other users’ amplification of the xenophobic message. Among these strategies, analogical perspective-taking, encouraging the sender to compare their own experiences of being attacked online with their discriminatory behavior towards the outgroup, is particularly effective. In contrast, disapproval messages have weaker effects. These findings provide theoretical and actionable insights for how to reduce intergroup hostility and its online amplification.
Thursday 12 October 2023 | Seminar Room 2
Downward Class Mobility and Far-Right Party Support (with Alan M. Jacobs, UBC)
The relative effects of economic and social change on support for far-right parties persistently occupies the attention of scholars and the public. We argue that many explanations, by examining short-run economic change or levels of social and cultural characteristics, miss a core determinant of the rise of the far right: long-run material deterioration, with its concomitant implications for social status. Employing intergenerational occupational mobility, a measure uniquely able to capture both components, we provide the first broad evidence of this pattern across 10 countries and 2 decades. We then distinguish (a) between level and change effects with the aid of diagonal reference models and (b) between income and status effects through the use of historical occupational wage data. Downward (but not upward) occupational mobility predicts far-right voting across ten developed democracies and intergenerational differences in real income play a role independent of occupational status.
Thursday 19 October 2023 | Seminar Room 2
Fighting Populism on Its Own Turf: Experimental Evidence (with Vincenzo Galasso, Bocconi; Massimo Morelli, Bocconi; and Piero Stanig, Bocconi)
Abstract TBD
Thursday 26 October 2023 | Seminar Room 2
Thomas Kurer (University of Zurich)
Chasing Opportunities in the Knowledge Economy: Moving Places, Moving Politics? (with Valentina Consiglio, University of Konstanz)
The rise of the knowledge economy has profoundly transformed the political landscape. Thriving urban knowledge hubs have become almost synonymous with cosmopolitan environments whereas lagging-behind areas are characterized by stronger anti-establishment sentiments. We advance the literature with a more dynamic perspective by studying individual relocations to examine the political consequences of the strong pull into destinations that are typically more progressive than most places of origin. We propose an innovative measure of local opportunity at the NUTS-3 level in Germany and merge this “opportunity map” with individual-level panel data to assess how relocations into knowledge hubs affect political behavior. In line with a mechanism of assimilation, we find strong and consistent evidence that moving to opportunity fosters political integration and shifts political preferences to the left. Our findings suggest that the ongoing movement of populations from rural regions to prosperous cities may come with a self-reinforcing political dynamic that creates a strong and lasting progressive coalition in the mid- and long-term.
Thursday 02 November 2023 | Seminar Room 2
The C-SPAN Effect: Televised Debates, Emotional Appeals, and Political Accountability
We study the effect of televised broadcasts of floor debates on the rhetoric and behavior of U.S. Congress Members. First, we show in a differences-in-differences analysis that the introduction of C-SPAN broadcasts in 1979 increased the use of emotional appeals in the House relative to the Senate, where televised floor debates were not introduced until later. Second, we use exogenous variation in C-SPAN channel positioning as an instrument for C-SPAN viewership by Congressional district and show that House Members from districts with exogenously higher C-SPAN viewership are more emotive in floor debates. Looking to electoral pressures as a mechanism, we find the emotionality effect of C-SPAN is strongest in competitive districts. C-SPAN exposure increases the vote share for incumbent Congress Members and citizens’ approval of their job in Congress, and more so among Members who speak more emotionally. Contra accountability models of transparency, C-SPAN has no effect on measures of legislative effort on behalf of constituents, and if anything it reduces a politician’s constituency orientation. We find that local news coverage – that is, mediated rather than direct transparency – has the opposite effect of C-SPAN, increasing legislative effort but with no effect on emotional rhetoric. These results highlight the importance of audience and mediation in the political impacts of higher transparency.
Thursday 09 November 2023 | Seminar Room 2
Natalia Garbiras-Diaz (Harvard Business School)
Declared versus revealed support for democracy: Survey and real-world evidence in Latin America (with Loreto Cox, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
Public support for democracy is believed to serve as a safeguard against undemocratic behavior by politicians. Most of our measures of support for democracy come from public opinion surveys, based on questions that may suffer from social desirability bias and overlook the trade-offs that citizens face when choosing candidates. In 2022, we conducted rich two-wave panel surveys in Colombia and Peru. The baseline covered how citizens understand and value democracy in the abstract, and included a conjoint experiment, in which one of the manipulated attributes was whether the candidate adopted anti-democratic positions, following Graham and Svolik (2020). Shortly after, in December 2022, former Peru’s president, Pedro Castillo, attempted a failed self-coup and was then impeached by Congress. We compare (1) declared support for democracy in baseline questions with (2) revealed democratic commitment when facing trade-offs, as found in the conjoint, and (3) de facto support for democracy leveraging Castillo’s (real-world) anti-democratic move. We find that citizens behave slightly more democratically than a coin flip, even those who are declared democrats. Moreover, declared democratic attitudes weakly predict revealed democratic commitment. Citizens trade in democracy for ideological proximity and see real-world democratic deviations through partisan lenses. Our findings suggest a limited role of citizens as a democratic check, especially in polarized democracies.
Thursday 16 November 2023 | Seminar Room 2
Evaluating the Effects of Inclusive Historical Narratives on Democratic Attitudes: Evidence from India and the United States
Abstract TBD
Thursday 23 November 2023 | Seminar Room 2
Information Processing in Participatory Governance
Abstract TBD
Thursday 30 November 2023 | Seminar Room 2
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Thursday 07 December 2023 | Seminar Room 2
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