Queen Bee Immigrant: The Effects of Status Perceptions on Immigration Attitudes; Working Paper
This work examines a seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon observed in many Western democracies, whereby parts of the immigrant population oppose new waves of immigration. I propose a mechanism based on group status distribution that, complementarily to other considerations, can help to explain these preferences. I hypothesize that relative status deprivation, that is, the degree to which a given national/ethnic group is ranked low in the ethnic status hierarchy of the host country, has a negative impact on the attitudes that the members of this group have towards even lower-ranked groups. In the experiment, run with a sample of participants with an immigration background residing in Germany (N=1,159), I manipulate participants’ status perceptions by providing them with either a positive or a negative evaluation of their national/ethnic in-group, as evaluated by a separate group of native-majority (German) participants. The results show that exposing participants to a negative evaluation of their in-group leads them to express more negative views of the refugees from the Middle East and to significantly decrease their willingness to donate to an organization supporting refugees, while not altering their generosity towards other same- or higher-status out-groups. I examine several possible channels and provide evidence that suggests that the treatment effect works through manipulating participants’ perceived norms surrounding prejudice expression towards low-status groups.
Finally, the results show that treatment affects not only the privately held attitudes but also participants’ willingness to publicly express them, as participants holding critical views of the refugees disclose them more readily when under observation of the native-majority participants if they received a negative (rather than positive) evaluation of their in-group.
Mating Market Competition and Gender Norms; with Elias Dinas
We study norms regulating socially acceptable female behavior and the effects of between-group competition in the mating market on their development. We focus on a case study featuring an inflow of ethnic Greek refugees arriving from Turkey following the Greco-Turkish conflict in the early 20th century and examine how the composition of the incoming refugee population influenced the gender norms in the affected localities. We leverage the fact that the conflict in Turkey resulted in a large number of men being captured or executed before they could emigrate. Consequently, women were overrepresented in the refugee population, triggering a competition shock in the mating market. At the time, prevailing norms stigmatized women living outside male-headed households, making female refugees particularly vulnerable to stereotypes of low moral standards. We conjecture that for a sufficient level of competition, an individual from the local population has an incentive to double down on conservative gender norms as a means of undermining the reputation of the newcomer competitors, even if this does not align with their true preferences. Specifically, individuals invested in the mating prospects of local women—whether for themselves or their families—may benefit from emphasizing female `purity’ as a valued trait, thereby amplifying the locals’ comparative advantage over the morally stigmatized competition. We hypothesize that this, in turn, led to an increased value placed on conservative values signaled by female behavior. To study this idea, we exploit the variation in the gender composition of refugees in a given locality as a proxy for the intensity of competition relying on the as-good-as-random allocation of refugees determined by decisions of Greek authorities. We combine analyses from census data; multiple marriage registries; and a fine-tailored survey to examine our mating competition mechanism against other competing explanations for the observed patterns.
Berlinguer I Love You (Still): the Downstream Effects of Expressive Voting, with Elias Dinas and Riccardo Di Leo; Working paper
Abstract. For nearly as long as the rational voting paradox has puzzled scholars, it has been recognized that voters’ decisions are influenced by expressive motivations. Yet, since disentangling emotional from instrumental drivers remains an inherently difficult task, little is known about how voting on the former grounds can shape future political preferences. We fill this gap by focusing on a rare instance of expressive voting: support for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1984 European election, preceded by the sudden death of PCI’s leader, Enrico Berlinguer. Via a Regression Discontinuity approach, exploiting differential expressive motives along the border(s) of Berlinguer’s electoral district, we show that municipal-level support for PCI increased more sharply in 1984 in areas where voters could express their preference for the just-deceased leader. Combining voting records and individual survey data, we further show how votes cast on expressive grounds in 1984 returned to PCI for about five years since Berlinguer’s death.
EU Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman: Politics of Women’s Representation in the EU Parliament, with Anatole Cheysson and Riccardo Di Leo
Since its inception, the European Parliament (EP) has experienced an almost parallel rise in the share of elected women and in the number of member states mandating gender quotas at the party list level. Building upon the “critical mass” framework and combining several data sources, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the effect of quotas on women’s descriptive and substantive representation in the EP. We find that, despite (mechanically) raising the number of female candidates to the EP, quotas left the share of elected women unaffected. While failing to boost voters’ likelihood to vote for women, the policy made, in fact, party selectorates more likely to relegate female candidates to the bottom of the electoral lists. Nevertheless, quotas appear to have raised the average discipline of male MEPs in Roll Call Votes. We show that this side effect of the policy is driven by a reduction in the re-electability perspectives of male incumbents, due to the lower number of slots “available” to men in party lists.
Inequality and Social Influence: Monetary Hierarchies Shape Persuasive Power, with Andrea F. M. Martinangeli; Working paper
The transmission of adaptively valuable behaviours requires successful individuals to exert greater influence on others’ actions. Hierarchical social organisations ease the recognition of successful, higher-ranked individuals in a group and hence facilitate this process. We investigate whether purely monetary rank, defined exclusively in terms of the amount of resources held by an individual, is capable, in isolation of any other intervening mechanism, to grant greater influence over others’ choices. Among a representative sample of the German population, we find that high monetary rank grants individuals greater influence over others’ actions.
Nudging punishment against sharing of fake news; with Amalia Álvarez-Benjumea, Giulia Andrighetto and Eugenia Polizzi;
European Economic Review (2024)
Corrective comments posted in response to misinformation shared on social media are not only effective in reducing belief in misinformation among those observing the interaction but also serve as a publicly observable social punishment against fake news sharing. We suggest that, by visibly displaying punishing behavior, corrective comments have the potential to function as a norm nudge, updating observers’ perception of the norms regulating punishment, the so-called “meta-norms”. We conducted a preregistered online experiment in which participants joined discussions resembling an online forum and could comment on posts shared by previous users. We manipulated participants’ possibility to observe corrective comments replying to a post sharing fake news and measured the effect of this variation on their propensity to leave a corrective comment. We show that participants exposed to posts corrected by other users are significantly more likely to reply with a corrective comment, even after controlling for participants’ perceived accuracy of the shared post. Participants exposed to the corrections provided by previous users perceive replying with corrections as more socially appropriate. Our results suggest that social corrections work as a (meta) norm nudge, increasing the probability of punishing norm violations by increasing the social appropriateness of correcting. Our findings suggest that interventions targeting “would-be” enforcers could complement existing policies specifically directed at norm violators.
Productivity Shocks and Conflict: The Role of Loss Aversion; Working Paper
This paper studies the consequences of productivity shocks on conflict behavior in the presence of loss aversion. In a first step, I incorporate expectation based loss preferences a la Kőszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007) into a Hirshleifer-Skaperdas conflict game and show that negative productivity shocks entail higher conflict investments if agents are loss averse (and lower investments if agents are gain-seeking); the reverse holds in case of a positive productivity shock. In a second step, a lab experiment (N=496) was conducted with participants playing repeated guns-and-butter conflict game under changing productivity regimes. The experimental results reveal that while adverse productivity shocks (channeled through loss aversion) have the predicted effects, positive productivity shocks lead to the predicted increase in conflict investment among gain-seeking but fail to reduce conflict investment among loss-averse participants. Furthermore, absent any changes in productivity level, conflict investments are shown to increase in the level of loss aversion.
Wins and losses in collective actions: Evidence from the field, with Raisa Sherif; AEA Registry
Global warming, deforestation, destruction of wildlife, etc. – all represent problems which require coordination on a global level to be successfully resolved. At the same time, they also have their representation on a smaller scale (e.g. on a local level). We run a field experiment with school children in India to study whether the experience of participation in a small-scale collective action affects the willingness to contribute in a related but larger collective action. Particularly, we are interested in the motivational and demotivational effects of having achieved a “small win” or having failed to do so, on scaling-up the collective effort and the relative magnitude of these effects. Furthermore, we investigate whether success (failure) in the smaller scale collective action has heterogeneous effects on participants with different initial propensity to contribute.