Alizade, Jeyhun, Rafaela Dancygier, and Jonathan Homola. Structures of Bias: How the State Systematically Downplays Right-Wing Extremism.

The rise of right-wing extremism (RWE) is often attributed to citizens’ economic and cultural grievances. We know less about how the state facilitates RWE in contemporary democracies, despite commonly voiced claims that state actors help RWE flourish due to their biased treatment of political extremism. How valid is this critique? Analyzing thousands of documents covering the behavior of political parties, intelligence agencies, and the police in Germany over many decades and across states, we demonstrate that state actors have systematically downplayed RWE. This bias is not a feature of the state per se; it only emerges consistently among center-right actors. Partisanship thus biases how even presumptively neutral state actors address the far-right extremist threat, a bias that we find exists even in the absence of strategic electoral considerations. Taken together, our research demonstrates that the very state actors charged with fighting extremism are highly influenced by partisanship and ideology.

López Álvarez, Santiago, and Jonathan Homola. More Bullets, More Doves? The Impact of Violence on Political Behavior.

Exposure to violence plays a crucial role in shaping political behavior and preferences in the aftermath of conflicts. Previous studies find that citizens respond in different and often contrasting ways to violence exposure. In some cases, higher degrees of conflict generate more hawkish preferences and higher levels of political participation, while in other instances conflict exposure has the opposite effect. To explain this variation, we propose a two-dimensional framework of analysis that takes into consideration the type and level of an individual’s exposure to violence. We test our two-dimensional framework in the context o f the Colombian armed conflict. Regarding the level of violence, we show that in areas with high levels of conflict, there was more collective support for pacific solutions. In terms of the type of violence, we find that direct victims of the conflict are less likely to support negotiations than non-victims. The theory and results have important implications for researchers and policy-makers alike.

Homola, Jonathan. The Political Consequences of Group-Based Identities.

How do group-based identities affect political participation? The existing political science literature mostly understands group identities as something that political actors can choose to strategically emphasize and exploit in an attempt to affect participation. However, I show that making group-based identities salient can have unintended political consequences by also activating group stereotypes. Analyzing an original data set on sex-separated voting in Germany’s Weimar Republic, I argue that the implementation of separate voting heightens the salience of an individual’s gender identity and leads to stronger conformity with respective group norms. This in turn suppresses participation such as turnout, especially in rural areas. The empirical analysis supports these predictions and is robust to a number of model specifications. The findings have implications for studies of social identities, equal participation and the design of electoral institutions.

Homola, Jonathan, and Jeff Gill. A Flexible Class of Bayesian Frailty Models For Political Science Data.

This manuscript reviews basic nonparametric (Cox) survival models and shows how heterogeneous effects on time-to-eventoutcomes can be captured by frailty terms, which are analogous to hierarchies in multilevel models. A derivation and simulations are provided to emphasize that not accounting for frailties when present in the data leads to biased coefficients. We then extend the use of frailty models in political science by adding multiple nested and non-nested hierarchies in a Bayesian context. We also specify group-level covariates, which has not been done with political science data even though data in the discipline frequently have levels of aggregation. We illustrate the strength and flexibility of our model with applications in American Politics, Comparative Politics, and the Women in Politics literature.

Aaskoven, Lasse, and Jonathan Homola. The Long-term Effects of Refugees Exposure: Evidence from German Refugees in Denmark.

A large literature has discussed the effect of exposure to refugees and other immigrants on attitudinal change, including attitudes towards outgroups as well as social trust. Some of this work argues that exposure to outgroup suffering can harden the attitudes toward this outgroup leading to a more negative view of outgroup members and lower levels of social trust. We investigate this argument using the unique case of Denmark which was home to around 200,000 German refugees in the years following World War II and the German occupation of Denmark. Using survey data beginning in the 1970s, we find little robust evidence that a previous greater local concentration of German refugees had any effect on Danes’ attitudes towards Germans. However, there is some indication that generalized social trust is lower for Danes of the World War II generation living in areas with a greater previous concentration of German refugees.

Bhakta, Kishan, Maranda Joyce, Tabitha Koch, and Jonathan Homola. Politician Responses in the Aftermath of Violent Threats.

Amid rising threats of violence towards elected officials, many politicians now openly publicize their concerns, citing fear and the toll on their mental well-being. Others project resolve, vowing to continue their duties unperturbed. We fielded an original survey experiment to understand the ways in which a politician’s response to violent threats can affect public tolerance for and perceived severity of these threats as well as support for the politician in the aftermath of the threat. We posit that after experiencing a threat of violence politicians can either (1) express their personal fear/concern regarding the threat, (2) express their strength/resilience in light of the threat, or (3) not comment on the threat. We also investigate which approach proves most impactful for women politicians, who often face heightened threats. We find that strong responses are beneficial for both men and women politicians and women face a bind as vulnerable and strong responses garner different effects on public opinion. Overall, our results provide insight into how elected officials might best respond to threats and harassment, with additional attention paid to gender differences in strategy effectiveness.

Etchevarren Acquarone, Iris, and Jonathan Homola. Closer to You? Candidate Gender and Proximity Voting.

How does candidate gender affect voter preferences under the traditional model of spatial competition? Although prior work shows that voters tend to have biased perceptions of ideological positions and issue expertise when comparing female and male candidates, we do not yet know how these perceptions ultimately influence vote choice in a proximity framework. We argue that voters are confronted with a trade-off involving (i) candidate gender, (ii) ideological distance (proximity considerations), and (iii) policy issues (valence considerations). We disentangle the interplay of these three factors by using a survey experiment and by re-analyzing existing survey experiments which neglected candidate gender as an otherwise unimportant control variable. The results help us better understand the interplay of candidate gender and proximity voting as well as the advantages and disadvantages that female politicians face when running for office. As such, they contribute to a lively literature on gender gaps in voter perceptions as well as voting preferences and vote choice.

Ezrow, Lawrence, Timothy Hellwig, and Jonathan Homola. Policy Responsiveness to Women.

Do European governments respond disproportionately in favor or against the policy preferences of women? We argue that the answer likely varies across policy domains and depends on the salience that different issues have for female and male voters. Our analysis of policy spending and public opinion in European democracies shows that governing policies tend respond to women’s preferences with respect to social spending – a domain that is particularly salient for female voters. In addition, while responsiveness is greater in electoral systems that feature less proportional electoral rules (e.g., plurality voting systems), other institutions such as the proportion of women in parliament do not systematically enhance responsiveness to women’s policy preferences. We also find that the results shift for military spending (i.e., a domain that is salient for male voters) where governing policy is disproportionately responsive to men’s preferences, and that disproportional electoral rules also create greater responsiveness to men on this issue.