A week after being awarded the A.SK Bright Mind Award at the WZB, Harvard economist Stefanie Stantcheva will give a WZB Talk on the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking - the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others.

In late 2018, the local government of Madrid implemented a low emission zone (LEZ) in the central district of the city. Although the primary goal of the policy was to enhance air quality, it might also have implications for other related outcomes. For instance, extensive research has documented the detrimental effect of polluted air on academic performance. Consequently, if Madrid’s LEZ was successful in reducing traffic-related emissions, we might observe an improvement in academic performance among students schooled in the LEZ area.

Over the past forty years, since the Reagan-era paradigm shift to deregulation, income and wealth inequality in the United States has grown significantly faster than in other advanced industrial democracies. High economic inequality has contributed to severe political polarization, socio-economic and geographic segmentation, and erosion of democratic institutions. Analogous processes in Russia and China followed their market openings over the same period.

Social media is a central part of the public sphere and as such of central importance for democracy. In its current form social media is arguably in part responsible for democratic backsliding. The question is how social media should be regulated so that its deliberative democratic potential is enhanced and its dystopian tendencies are held in check. The talk analysis competing approaches that seek to achieve this and analyzes the legal frameworks governing these choices.

Previous research (Carey and Gohdes, 2021) concludes most journalist killings by the state occur in democracies. This paper investigates the link between regime type and journalist killings and argues that democracies are not more hostile to journalists than autocracies. In fact, liberal democratic regimes are the safest of regimes for journalists, i.e. those with by far the least number of journalist killings by the state between 2002 and 2016.

What is the relationship between education and politics? How do government shaped education worldwide until our present day? Adrián del Rio presents a novel dataset on education systems worlwide and describes trends on political control and the politicized nature of education system. The dataset will help researchers and policy-makers to examine several questions about education and politics, improving the quality of policy advice. A subset of the dataset can be provided upon request.

Contact and conflict theory famously predict opposite effects of inter-ethnic exposure on anti-minority discrimination. Contact theory predicts that inter-ethnic contact reduces prejudice; whereas conflict theory predicts that inter-ethnic contact leads to more discrimination. The scope conditions for both theories, however, are vague; prior evidence is mostly correlational; and supportive field experiments have largely accrued in rarified settings.

Existing research in Germany based on survey reports suggest that patients with low income and non-German names are discriminated against both in access to health care and in treatment by specialists. However, because this research is mostly based on interviews with affected individuals, the findings are prone to bias. Field experiments can provide robust evidence of discrimination due to ethnic and socioeconomic background.

Content moderation is key to operations of social media platforms and a large part of this work is outsourced to the global economy. While allowing for cost efficiency and accessing local labor skills and knowledge, outsourcing is generally characterized by indeterminacies in the production process. Moreover, it is complicated by the dynamic character of social media platforms with continuous changes in user activities and moderation policies.

Over the last several decades, two seemingly contradictory trends have emerged: a rise in democracy assistance and a decline in democracy. What explains this disconnect? Although existing work provides some insight about democracy promotion’s mixed effects, more work is needed to understand the impact of additional, often understudied forms of assistance. I explore this puzzle on a panel of 136 nations from 1981-2015 by assessing how two types of democracy promotion – democracy promoting international nongovernmental organizations (DINGOs) and democracy aid – impact governance.

Are teachers biased in their grading against certain demographic groups? Using data on more than 1 million Danish 9th grade students, we find evidence for small pro-girl and pro-migrant-background biases. We also document large variance in bias across teachers and a negative (“compensatory”) relationship between teacher bias and relative performance of the student group on standardized tests.

China’s Social Credit System is the most ambitious human metric in history, using technology to govern society and create the “perfect citizen.” I trace the historical roots of “governance-by-numbers” systems and show that the metrification of social and personal life also exists in Western societies. I point out the rise of a new governance system, shifting from the rule of law (“nomocracy”) to a system governed by numbers (“numerocracy”), and discuss the consequences for liberal democracies in terms of governance, citizenship, human rights, law & morality.

Elizabeth Nugent is an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University.

Guillem Amatller Dómine is a Predoctoral Fellow at IBEI and PhD candidate at Pompeu Fabra in Political Science (Barcelona).

When do groups value revenge or forgiveness in identity-based conflict? Recent data from the US and plans for cross-national comparison.

Stephen Benard is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Indiana University Bloomington.

For further questions, please e-mail sbenard [at] indiana.edu.

In the Russian War against Ukraine the existing international legal order is challenged. At the heart of the challenge are struggles over the interpretation of the existing international legal order and what it should become.

Mattias Kumm is Research Professor “Global Constitutionalism” at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Professor “Rule of Law in the Age of Globalization” at Humboldt University Berlin.

In Switzerland, the predominant family arrangement of different-sex parents is a gendered division of tasks. The majority of couples adopt the model of the father as breadwinner and the mother working parttime in the labour market. This ongoing socio-legal research project is interested in the reorganisation of family arrangements at the moment of divorce and more specifically in how different concepts of gender (in)equality play out in the negotiation of divorce agreements in Switzerland.

The "data revolution'' is changing the way we work with empirical data in the social sciences. Increasingly, traces of social and political interactions can be recorded digitally, leading to vast amounts of new data that become available for research. This poses new challenges for the way we organize and process research data. This course aims to provide participants with an introduction to different data management techniques. Departing from simple tools such as spreadsheets, we move on to more powerful data management software such as relational databases for tabular data.

This talk brings together seven years of work on understanding the political economic forces that have led to the UK's exit from the European Union in 2020. A common theme across populist surges across the West is the resonance that populist campaigns have with voters in so-called left-behind regions. The focus on cross-sectional patterns, however, often masks understanding the wider social-, economic and political developments that give rise for the necessary conditions of populist revolts to emerge.

Political scientists often want to study members of hard-to-reach populations. A population is “hard-to-reach” or “hidden” when no sampling frame exists, and acknowledgment of membership is potentially threatening. With such a broad definition, we might include opposition groups (from the right or the left), sexual minorities, political brokers, or refugees, to say some. While many methods have been developed to approach and study hidden populations, they have seldom been applied in political science research.

The information that media provides to citizens fuels their attitudes and opinions towards social movements. Although scholars have extensively studied the ways in which media portrays protests, existing analyses have mostly focused on the verbal component of news and have overlooked a crucial element of the communication process: the visual material. Therefore, in this talk, I focus on visual frames of protests. First, I analyze the differences in the framing of the mood and environment that liberal and conservative outlets use when they talk about protests.

Current societal challenges such as the Covid-19 pandemic or climate change highlight the tension between individual freedom and collective good provision. Striking the right balance is particularly delicate for democratic governments whose authority hinges on citizen acceptance and legitimation. When and why do citizens accept far-reaching limitations of their individual rights for a greater societal good?

With the declaration of a global pandemic in March 2020 and the subsequent imposition of lockdown regulations, the immediate expectation was that social movements were destined to enter into a period of latency, or at the very least, invisibility. Given the introduction of severe restrictions on the use of public space, it seemed that Covid-19 had managed to halt the incredibly intense period of global protest that had shaken the world in the Autumn of 2019, with peaks of contestation in places as diverse as Lebanon, Chile, Hong Kong and Catalonia.

The concept of trustworthiness can be understood to involve an informal social contract where principals authorize others to act on their behalf in the expectation that the agent will fulfill their responsibilities, despite conditions of risk and uncertainty. When evaluating the trustworthiness of political institutions, public judgments are expected to reflect the quality of government procedures, especially the principles of competency, impartiality and integrity.

This will be a one-day event, entirely virtual, focusing on R Markdown—a relatively new document type to analyse data and communicate results, in a reproducible and efficient manner (full description attached). By combining code, text, and resultsin a single document, R Markdown allows automation of otherwise manual—therefore tedious, costly to repeat, and error-prone—steps in writing research papers. Therefore, those interested in writing research-based papers, from essays to journal articles, are likely tobenefit from this course.

Can bombs and broadcasts instigate resistance against a foreign regime? We examine the canonical case of bombing designed to undermine enemy morale—the Allied bomber offensive against Germany during WWII. Our evidence shows that both air power and the airwaves undermined regime support.

Shifting media diets are increasingly viewed as a key driver of political polarization. In particular, prior research has focused on greater choice between partisan outlets and the rise of online news. This paper sheds light on a heretofore understudied yet equally salient development: the decline of local news. We argue that local news exits can induce polarization by increasing exposure to news about national politics, where partisan and ideological differences are more salient than at the local level.

The decline of manufacturing employment is frequently invoked as a key cause of worsening U.S. population health trends, including rising mortality due to ‘deaths of despair’.

The virtual workshop will focus on geo-spatial vector data handling and computation with R. We will start with geo data visualization and spatial projections. We will then continue with spatial and geometric operations, i.e. spatial subsetting and joining, topological relations (e.g. which points lie in which areas?), centroids, distances, buffers, etc. I will also give some pointers on data sources and APIs for geo data, and a short overview on the numerous file formats used in this field.

We investigate how human cooperation evolves over two different dimensions of time. Subjects in a laboratory experiment play a high-frequency two-player Cournot-Tullock market game over hundreds of timed periods with and without information about the payoff function. By varying the length of periods across treatments, we generate a data set that is stable in "physical time" (seconds) but varies in "period time".

Many employees work in jobs that do not match their level of formal education. Status inconsistency theory (SIT) argues that such mismatches result in stress, dissatisfaction, political alienation, and social withdrawal. However, extant SIT scholarship does not fully appreciate the consequences of an identification problem due to the perfect collinearity among the effects of occupation, education, and their mismatch. I review the literature and show that prior findings depend on implicit theoretical assumptions that are often implausible once spelled out.

Can extremism become contagious? Many papers have shown that social control of public actions can lead to sudden transitions from ‘extreme to mainstream’. What is not clear is whether social spillovers can also have first-order effects on private actions, like voting, where persuasion is key. We first build a measure of social interaction frequency using granular data from the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic in Hamburg and information on household characteristics.

Martin Ehlert is Head of the WZB Research Group National Educational Panel Study: Vocational Training and Lifelong Learning.

Lisa Ruhrort is Research Fellow of the WZB Research Group Digital Mobility and Social Differentiation.

Jonas Wiedner is Research Fellow of the WZB Research Unit Migration, Integration, Transnationalization.

Co-authors: Isabell Schierenbeck, Ellen Lust, Kevin Köhler

This lecture briefly characterizes the core of President Trump's approach to politics; places him into the broader historical context of American ethnonationalism and conservatism; and discuss the contemporary politics of white identity. In the fall of 2020 America finds itself in a profound constitutional crisis that resonates, disconcertingly, with the year 1932 and its different American and German outcomes. History does not repeat itself. But does it rhyme?

Please note that this event takes place in English only with no translation.

Please note that this event takes place in English only with no translation.

The event is part of the WZB Talks series.

Thomas Palfrey is Research Professor of the WZB Research ProfessorshipCollective Decision Making.

Please note that this event takes place in English only with no translation.

The event is part of the WZB Talks series.

Jelena Cupać and İrem Ebetürk are Research Fellows of the WZB Research Unit Global Governance.

Andrew Schotter is professor at the Department of Economics, New York University.

Please note that this event takes place in English only with no translation.

The event is part of the WZB Talks series.

by Leonard Wantchekon

by Yiming Liu and Jana Friedrichsen

The Working Group on African Political Economy (WGAPE), founded in 2002, is a network of researchers with deep field research experience that meets regularly to provide structured feedback on in-progress research papers related to the theme of African political economy. It brings together faculty and advanced graduate students in economics, political science, and other social science disciplines, with a combined focus on field-based research and political economy methods.

The Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) brings together faculty and advanced graduate students in economics, political science, and other social science disciplines, with a combined focus on field-based research and political economy methods. The workshop involves in-depth discussions of papers and research designs that are circulated and read in advance, and is ideally suited for feedback on work-in-progress.

Organizers: Ana Garcia-Hernandez, Alexandra Scacco, Michael Seese

This workshop focuses on the upcoming Horizon 2020 call, “Addressing the challenge of migrant integration through ICT-enabled solutions.” Potential partners from European institutions and a select set of US-based experts in the fields of intergroup contact and migrant integration will gather to address this challenging call.  The workshop’s H2020 proposal will focus on a social contact metaketa – a multi-site coordinated study with common interventions and measures to help iden

Policies focused on the integration of migrants and refugees are often driven by conventional wisdoms and fear, and there are persistent concerns that integration policies are failing both host communities and migrants in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. In this context, the research unit Institutions and Political Inequality will host a two-day workshop to bring together practitioners in government, decision-makers from international and non-governmental organizations, and leading researchers in this field.

The Political Economy of Development research area will host a 2-day workshop with a focus on how to conceptualize and measure across countries the multiple dimensions of political inequality between individuals and societal groups. One goal of the workshop is to contribute to the debate surrounding the measurement process for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG #16.7 ("Ensuring responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels").

The Political Economy of Development research area will host a joint WZB-Columbia University workshop to present and discuss ongoing research, completed research, and research designs. Presentations by members of the Institutions and Political Inequality research unit and doctoral students at Columbia will include work on gender empowerment in Uganda, bureaucratic organization in Sierra Leone, gender-based violence in Congo, community policing in Papua New Guinea. The workshop takes the form of small group focused discussions on research and will generally not include presentations.

The WZB is pleased to support the annual graduate student conference of the Berlin Development Economics Network. This daylong event features presentations of new work on a range of topics including inequality, political voice, migration and remittances as well as a presentation on research transparency in social science.

For more information about the workshop please visit  https://sites.google.com/site/berlindevnetwork/workshop2015