Periodic Reporting for period 3 - POLITSOLID (The Ties that Bind: Experimental Analyses of Political Solidarities in Modern European Democracies)
Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30
Democracies in Europe face a multitude of societal challenges that are thought to affect political solidarities negatively.
• Population ageing changes the intergenerational balance of age groups and puts the intergenerational contract enshrined in the public pension system in danger (Goerres & Vanhuysse, 2012).
• Growing income inequality sets the worlds of the rich and the poor further apart. Everyday segregation between income groups, especially residential segregation, makes it increasingly difficult for rich people to see themselves in solidarity with the poor with whom they rarely interact in everyday life (Sands, 2017).
• Mass immigration diversifies the ethnic, linguistic and religious make-up of societies, and reduces the likelihood that someone benefitting from a policy is like oneself in terms of these socially constructed lines of identity (Banting & Kymlicka, 2017a).
• The pandemic Covid-19 created strains on societies, public budgets and states.
Modern European democracies also face a number of political challenges, which are partially the consequences of societal developments. The financial crisis of 2007/2008 with its EU bail-out policies and the Brexit referendum in 2016 raise the question of transnational political solidarities across EU member states. The rise of right-wing populism since the mid-1980s, as evidenced by several political parties across Europe with a strong welfare-chauvinist stance, makes the issue of who is in and out of a community within a nation-state very salient in political discourse.
This project starts from the assumption that political solidarities are necessary for functioning liberal democracies. POLITSOLID is about experimentally testing the causes of political solidarities across European democracies. Political solidarities are conceptualised as a multidimensional phenomenon at the individual level. They consist of general political solidarity and group-specific political solidarities. A citizen of a nation-state, or of another community of solidarity, has a certain level of willingness to support redistribution within that nation-state regardless of the recipients. This is general political solidarity. Additionally, citizens support redistribution only for members of a certain social group. This is called group-specific political solidarity, and its level is partially determined by general political solidarity.
The main communities of solidarity that define the political basis for public redistribution in focus will be: (1) citizens and residents of a nation-state, (2) citizens and residents of the EU, and (3) residents of a locality. Redistribution is defined as any public allocation of resources, be it in terms of monies, services or advantageous regulations, to other individuals in one’s community of solidarity. Three social groups will be looked at with regard to of group-specific political solidarities: age, income and ethnicity/descent. They stem from the macro-level observations of societal challenges (population ageing, rising income inequality and immigration) mentioned above.
The project will produce new methodologies of measuring political solidarities in surveys and how to gauge the causal effects of macro-, meso- and micro-level factors on political solidarities with a new virtual world platform. Large-N panel surveys in several countries and field experiments with local actors allow to test the wider implications of the findings and the poential of real-world improvement for better citizen-state relationships.
• Population ageing changes the intergenerational balance of age groups and puts the intergenerational contract enshrined in the public pension system in danger (Goerres & Vanhuysse, 2012).
• Growing income inequality sets the worlds of the rich and the poor further apart. Everyday segregation between income groups, especially residential segregation, makes it increasingly difficult for rich people to see themselves in solidarity with the poor with whom they rarely interact in everyday life (Sands, 2017).
• Mass immigration diversifies the ethnic, linguistic and religious make-up of societies, and reduces the likelihood that someone benefitting from a policy is like oneself in terms of these socially constructed lines of identity (Banting & Kymlicka, 2017a).
• The pandemic Covid-19 created strains on societies, public budgets and states.
Modern European democracies also face a number of political challenges, which are partially the consequences of societal developments. The financial crisis of 2007/2008 with its EU bail-out policies and the Brexit referendum in 2016 raise the question of transnational political solidarities across EU member states. The rise of right-wing populism since the mid-1980s, as evidenced by several political parties across Europe with a strong welfare-chauvinist stance, makes the issue of who is in and out of a community within a nation-state very salient in political discourse.
This project starts from the assumption that political solidarities are necessary for functioning liberal democracies. POLITSOLID is about experimentally testing the causes of political solidarities across European democracies. Political solidarities are conceptualised as a multidimensional phenomenon at the individual level. They consist of general political solidarity and group-specific political solidarities. A citizen of a nation-state, or of another community of solidarity, has a certain level of willingness to support redistribution within that nation-state regardless of the recipients. This is general political solidarity. Additionally, citizens support redistribution only for members of a certain social group. This is called group-specific political solidarity, and its level is partially determined by general political solidarity.
The main communities of solidarity that define the political basis for public redistribution in focus will be: (1) citizens and residents of a nation-state, (2) citizens and residents of the EU, and (3) residents of a locality. Redistribution is defined as any public allocation of resources, be it in terms of monies, services or advantageous regulations, to other individuals in one’s community of solidarity. Three social groups will be looked at with regard to of group-specific political solidarities: age, income and ethnicity/descent. They stem from the macro-level observations of societal challenges (population ageing, rising income inequality and immigration) mentioned above.
The project will produce new methodologies of measuring political solidarities in surveys and how to gauge the causal effects of macro-, meso- and micro-level factors on political solidarities with a new virtual world platform. Large-N panel surveys in several countries and field experiments with local actors allow to test the wider implications of the findings and the poential of real-world improvement for better citizen-state relationships.
1. We created a new research group under challenges of the pandemic and a cyber attack of our university, using innovative ways of collaborating remotely and personally on campus. The research group consists of three paid members of personnel (PI, postdoc, PhD student) plus research assistants and four external experts as well as one commissioned programmer.
2. We published two open-access articles in Q1-journals, have two more papers under review, and three as conference papers that we are currently preparing for submission.
3. We engaged in numerous network activities: an intense 2-day workshop in Duisburg, the organisation of panels at the European Survey Research Association, a research stay at the Excellence Cluster of the University of Konstanz, 12 invited presentations, 8 general conference participations; continuous dissemination through social media.
4. We created new technical solutions for interactive behavioural instruments that were tested and employed in an international online survey.
5. We developed, commissioned, pre-tested and piloted a new text-based virtual world platform Novaland to experimentally test state experiences.
6. We discovered new findings about the effects of corruption experiences on political solidarity, about how people process the solidarity behaviour of others and how political solidarity behaviour is related to party preferences.
7. We received formal and informal training on technical skills about oTree, Python, paradata measurement in surveys.
8. The PI at R4 stage mentored the R1- and R2-stage researchers in the group about academic writing techniques, time management, motivational management and optimal visibility in academia.
FLIPPO's suggestions to add:
§$AG - 2025 Politsolid Workshop
§$AG - number of conferences and invited presentations since mid 2024
§$AG - evaluated survey techniques to collect survey data on political solidarity
§$AG - built on initial experiences with Novaland to create another immersive version of a fictional state
§$AG - list on current working papers --> pt. 2 updaten
2. We published two open-access articles in Q1-journals, have two more papers under review, and three as conference papers that we are currently preparing for submission.
3. We engaged in numerous network activities: an intense 2-day workshop in Duisburg, the organisation of panels at the European Survey Research Association, a research stay at the Excellence Cluster of the University of Konstanz, 12 invited presentations, 8 general conference participations; continuous dissemination through social media.
4. We created new technical solutions for interactive behavioural instruments that were tested and employed in an international online survey.
5. We developed, commissioned, pre-tested and piloted a new text-based virtual world platform Novaland to experimentally test state experiences.
6. We discovered new findings about the effects of corruption experiences on political solidarity, about how people process the solidarity behaviour of others and how political solidarity behaviour is related to party preferences.
7. We received formal and informal training on technical skills about oTree, Python, paradata measurement in surveys.
8. The PI at R4 stage mentored the R1- and R2-stage researchers in the group about academic writing techniques, time management, motivational management and optimal visibility in academia.
FLIPPO's suggestions to add:
§$AG - 2025 Politsolid Workshop
§$AG - number of conferences and invited presentations since mid 2024
§$AG - evaluated survey techniques to collect survey data on political solidarity
§$AG - built on initial experiences with Novaland to create another immersive version of a fictional state
§$AG - list on current working papers --> pt. 2 updaten
POLITSOLID is innovative in several ways:
• Theoretically, it synthesises existing approaches mainly from political science, social psychology and behavioural economics into a novel interdisciplinary framework that is genuinely about multiple political solidarities.
• Empirically, the project improves the existing body of knowledge by using primarily experimental instead of observational methods; the latter being the dominant approach in the literature.
• It creates a novel artificial state Novaland on an online experimental platform to simulate variants of the same state with different characteristics in which experimental subjects act as citizens. Thus, institutional and policy characteristics can be manipulated and their causal impact can be estimated.
• It will test the levers of political solidarities that political actors can pull in a field environment to carry out the ultimate test, namely whether political solidarities can be created intentionally by political actors themselves.
FLIPPO's suggestions to add:
§$AG - utilizing novel technical tools (GESIS app) to create an immersive study setting for a panel study with a virtual state
§$AG - conducting a large international panel study to infer on the contextual factors that affect political solidarity
• Theoretically, it synthesises existing approaches mainly from political science, social psychology and behavioural economics into a novel interdisciplinary framework that is genuinely about multiple political solidarities.
• Empirically, the project improves the existing body of knowledge by using primarily experimental instead of observational methods; the latter being the dominant approach in the literature.
• It creates a novel artificial state Novaland on an online experimental platform to simulate variants of the same state with different characteristics in which experimental subjects act as citizens. Thus, institutional and policy characteristics can be manipulated and their causal impact can be estimated.
• It will test the levers of political solidarities that political actors can pull in a field environment to carry out the ultimate test, namely whether political solidarities can be created intentionally by political actors themselves.
FLIPPO's suggestions to add:
§$AG - utilizing novel technical tools (GESIS app) to create an immersive study setting for a panel study with a virtual state
§$AG - conducting a large international panel study to infer on the contextual factors that affect political solidarity