research
under review
- Who Should Politicians Represent? How Winning an Election Influences Citizens’ Views on RepresentationTim Lars Allinger(R&R at The Journal of Politics)
Should elected politicians represent their own voters or all citizens, regardless of who they voted for? Though a fundamental question in representative democracies, we lack insights into citizens’ perspectives on this tension despite their essential role in democratic stability and legitimacy. I argue that while there is generally strong support for the idea that an elected politician should represent all citizens in their constituency (partisan surrogation), this support diminishes markedly due to self-interested considerations once citizens find themselves on the winning side of an election. Relying on a regression discontinuity design in close district races across three German national elections, I present quasi-experimental evidence in line with this argument. The findings indicate that many citizens expect partisan surrogation when losing without being willing to concede that to others upon an election victory. This highlights the need for a more dynamic perspective when studying citizens’ expectations of the representative system.
working papers
- Ethnic Exclusion and Hate Crimes against Immigrants: The Case of the Nomad Camps in ItalyTim Lars Allinger(Available upon request)
Open hostility and hate crimes against immigrants and other minority groups have seen a drastic increase throughout Europe in recent years. However, under which conditions citizens perceive it as legitimate to publicly reveal their xenophobic views and violently attack members of minority groups remains largely unclear. I argue that institutions signal what treatment of minorities is socially accepted, playing a key role in shaping citizens’ behavior toward these groups. Specifically, individuals experiencing the institutionalized exclusion of a disliked minority group in their local environment should perceive intolerant behavior as less stigmatized and act more likely upon their prejudiced attitudes in consequence. I focus on the so-called nomad camps in Italy, which are institutionalized mono-ethnic camps for Sinti and Roma, of whom some have lived there for more than 40 years until today, isolated from Italian mainstream society. I combine information on the geo-locations of all 150 official nomad camps with unique hate crime data on the municipality level. I identify the causal effect by exploiting the exogenous exposure of adjacent municipalities, looking at spatial spillover effects combined with an instrumental variable approach. I provide evidence that closeness to the nomad camps has led to a systematic increase in hate crimes against people with a migration background. Importantly, not only the camp inhabitants but also other immigrant groups, including people with an African or Asian background, face a higher level of hate and physical attacks close to the nomad camps. My findings have important implications for all societies facing increasing hostility towards minority groups and looking for ways to counteract this trend.
- How Citizens Perceive Others: The Role of Social Norms for Democracies
Generations of political scientists seek to understand the relationship between citizens’ democratic values and democratic stability. The key premise of this research tradition is that democratic societies live on a “social consensus” over a set of democratic values; a democratic norm. Yet, until today scholarship has neither carefully theorized the role of nor measured the social nature of this consensus. Building on research in social psychology, we conceptualize democratic norms as social norms: citizens may think that most people in democracies support its institutions (descriptive norm) and also that one ought to do so (injunctive norm). We then measure these perceptions across 14 countries using nationally representative surveys. We find that citizens have a strong perception of social democratic norms; however, mostly on abstract forms of support. Using a vignette experiment we also reveal that respondents’ preferences are conditional on their perception of social norms. Our research has important implications for research on democracy showcasing the role social norms play to craft democratic support in our societies.
- A Comprehensive Test of the Most Promising Method to Capture Social Desirability Bias in Online Surveys
Social scientists have long debated the question of how much social desirability biases affect the information they can gather from online survey responses. However, it remains unclear how and to what extent we can measure it. Reviewing relevant literature focusing on this problem, we argue that the most promising way to measure social desirability bias is manipulating it globally through an experimental design placed at the very start of a survey. This approach—if successful—allows researchers to achieve three crucial goals that other approaches fall short in achieving simultaneously: 1) assuring that social desirability rather than confounders is measured, 2) allowing for checking whether social desirability was actually manipulated, and 3) allowing for measuring social desirability pressures in an infinite number of outcomes throughout the survey. Employing both novel treatment designs and designs already used in established research, we demonstrate with pre-registered survey experiments in the United States (N = 5,000) and Denmark (N = 3,000) that this approach is much too risky for researchers to pursue. Specifically, we show that some treatment designs repeatedly fail to achieve manipulation (i.e., respondents do not believe their answers are being observed), whereas others achieve manipulation but do not affect outcomes which we know for a fact are marred by social desirability (i.e., respondents do not care even if they know they are being observed). We end the paper by providing advice for scholars regarding which approaches are then most feasible to pursue judging by to what extent they achieve the three crucial goals reported above.
work in progress
- Is this my Last Resort? Understanding Public Support for Hate Crimes against RefugeesTim Lars Allinger
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- Pro-Democratic Norms Against Undemocratic Behavior