Research project grants

Climate Risk, Land Loss, and Migration: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Bangladesh (Swiss National Science Foundation, 01.09.2019 – 31.08.2024, 442’284 CHF) (Co-led with V. Koubi) [Reporting in SZ-Daily] [Reporting in Reportagen-Magazine] [Podcast] Abstract

Global climate change is one of the most important and severe challenges the international community has ever faced. Existing evidence shows that it will have far-reaching repercussions for ecosystems and humans alike. Moreover, climate change is expected to induce mass-population dislocations, i.e., migration, due to droughts, sea level rise, or extreme weather events, such as stronger and more frequent storms or floods, particularly in developing countries with low capacity to protect themselves and adapt to climate change. However, recent studies on climate change induced human displacement do not account for the possibility that people might adapt to changing climatic conditions. This is particularly relevant to slow-onset environmental changes, such as sea-level rise, where individuals and societies can anticipate such changes and take precautionary measures. With this project, we aim at contributing to a better understanding of whether, when, and how environmental changes lead to human migration. First, we will offer a theoretical micro-foundation for the environment-migration nexus that highlights the different (i.e., behavioral, structural, and environmental) factors that induce people to migrate or stay. In particular, our framework proposes that there are multiple drivers behind decisions to migrate and that environmental changes are just one of them, which can have both direct effects on migration as well as indirect ones through impacts on other factors, such as individual/household economic well-being. Consequently, our framework seeks to bring analytical rigor to a field that has been dominated by unsubstantiated and casual empiricism. Second, we seek to provide credible empirical inferences concerning rates of migration due to livelihood losses caused by environmental changes. Since human exposure to environmental stress, whether induced by climatic changes or other factors, is non-randomly assigned, using observational data to empirically examine environmental migration is challenging. To cope with this challenge, we will focus on a particular case and develop risk maps for riverbank erosion along the Jamuna River in Bangladesh, and we will collect micro-level data to compare affected and unaffected populations at a similar baseline risk, as well as migrants and non-migrants from the very same area. The aim is to isolate the causal effect of deteriorating environmental livelihoods on migration.The project will not only identify the effect of environmental stress on migration behavior of individuals and communities in a particular case. It will also provide valuable insights of broader relevance into whether and how societies react, or could react, to slow-onset climatic changes such as se-level rise, drought, and soil/water salinity. Moreover, the methodology developed in the project can be applied in other cases and can inform prediction models of future climate-induced migration rates. The findings can be utilized by institutional actors at both local and international levels when seeking to identify policy options to increase the adaptive capacity of populations vulnerable to climatic changes.

The Comparative Legitimacy of Arms Exports in Top-Exporting EU and NATO Countries (German Foundation for Peace Research, 01.12.2022 – 31.05.2025, 150’000 €) (Co-PI, with P. Thurner) Abstract

The Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine sheds light on the central question of our research project: Should weapons be supplied to other countries? Under what conditions? What do the citizens of the main exporting states in the EU and NATO think about this? The example of Ukraine shows: Arms transfers can shape the political discussion in democratic states. Given the volatility of opinion polls, citizens‘ attitudes on this issue appear to be changeable, and the levels of support vary between countries. Surprisingly, however, there is little general research on public attitudes to arms transfers. Beyond the current and acute case of Ukraine, arms exports are repeatedly contested to varying degrees among political parties and in the public spheres in different nation-states. One of the main arguments put forward by civil society groups and, in particular, by parties of the political left is the possible impact of such transfers: the initiation, intensification or prolongation of armed conflicts, the violation of human rights or the stabilization of non-democratic regimes. Counterarguments point to economic and security interests of the sending state, or the support for legitimate defense interests of the receiving state. It is completely open whether the political discussion of such arguments is also reflected in citizens‘ attitudes toward arms exports. It is also unclear whether trade-offs between the various aspects actually differ in different countries. It is often argued that, compared to the German population, the populations of other Western democracies with a central role in the international arms transfer system (the United States, France, Italy, the United Kingdom) have much lower concerns about such exports. Thus, a cross-national comparison of voter reactions to arms exports is particularly important to test the assumption of German specificity.

Based on an innovative methodological approach, our project attempts to provide important answers to these essential questions. Using so-called conjoint designs, we implement an experimental format within population-representative surveys. Respondents are repeatedly confronted with multidimensional hypothetical choices between scenarios that differ in decision criteria (attributes). The decision tasks are designed to mimic specific policy options. Respondents are then asked to rank the scenarios and select their preferred option. In this way, we can determine the causal effect of the manipulated dimensions of these scenarios. The project will focus on the comparative relevance of morally legal, economic and security aspects in assessing the legitimacy of arms exports. It will identify value trade-offs between perceived impacts on economic welfare (jobs, innovation, etc.) and normative considerations (risk or presence of conflict, human rights violations, regime characteristics of the importer).

Einstellungen zu Waffenhandel in Deutschland und Frankreich – A Conjoint Experiment on the Comparative Legitimacy of Arms Exports in Germany and France (German Foundation for Peace Research, 01.06.2020 – 31.05.2021, 24’000 € (Co-PI, with P. Thurner) Abstract

The export of arms is severely contested between the German political parties and in the German public. A major argument by opposing civil society groups and mainly leftist parties is the reference to the supposed implications of such transfers: the triggering of civil and international conflict, the prolongation of such conflicts and their aggravation in terms of human losses, the violations of human rights, and the stabilization of non-democratic regimes. It is open, however, whether the political discussion of such arguments is also reflected in citizens’ attitudes towards arms exports. There is also no research on the question whether such attitudes differ systematically across countries. E.g., it seems that other Western democracies with a dominant role in the international arms transfer system like the US, the UK and France are less strongly opposing such exports. We want to provide a thorough empirical foundation for these anecdotal claims which is currently lacking in both scientific and public debate. Thus, a cross-country comparison of voter reactions towards arms exports is especially important for testing the assumption of the presence of a German specificity, but also for the internal reliability of alliances like NATO, or of a recently proposed European Defense Policy including the respective research and development initiatives like the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO). If decisions to transfers arms to countries like Saudi-Arabia, to the Kurds etc. cannot be supported by the German government due specific attitudes in its civil society, this will have consequences for the design of future cooperative defense and security regimes. In the case of France and Germany, open disputes over principles of the exports of jointly developed weapons have even led both countries to settle their conflict in the their Aachen Treaty in 2019, and in more detail in a Franco-German agreement on export controls in October 2019 (see Décret n° 2019-1168 du 13 novembre 2019). This pilot project seeks to provide answers to these essential questions building on an innovative methodical approach. It will use conjoint experiments to be implemented in two selected countries – Germany and France. According to SIPRIs 2019 Weapons transfer statistics, these two countries belong to the top 5 group of exporters of major weapons. In France, these exports are rather seldom a topic of political debates, in Germany that’s repeatedly the contrary.
Conjoint experiments allow to implement an experimental setting within a survey format. Respondents are several times confronted with multidimensional hypothetical decisions between choice sets which differ according to several dimensions (choice attributes). These decision tasks are designed in a way that they mimick concrete policy design options. Respondents are then asked to rate the individual choices and they select their preferred option. Attribute levels, i.e. the concrete description of the situation, are randomly assigned within choice sets. This enables the researcher to identify how choice characteristics causally affect both the rating and choice probability of a policy package in a within subject and between subject-design. We can thereby determine the causal effect of the manipulated dimensions of these scenarios. The project will for the first time focus on the comparative relevance of moral, economic and security aspects on the assessment of the legitimacy of weapons exports in Germany and France. It will derive value trade-offs between the perceived economic welfare impact (jobs, innovation etc.) and normative considerations (risk or presence of conflicts, human rights violations, regime characteristics of the importer). We expect these latter aspects to decrease the acceptance of arms exports in general. However, we anticipate these effects to be smaller or inexistent (ceteris paribus) in the case of France due to a different political history and culture. If this expectation is refuted, than it is rather institutional background conditions like the electoral system and the consequence of a low politicization in such settings of party competition. The pilot character of this study would may invite us to extend this design to more countries (especially to France and to the US) in later periods, and to elaborate in a more detailed way on the time- and context dependent interplay between economic and normative considerations in weapons exports.

Working papers (submitted/conference drafts)

Climate Change Policy Preferences and Foreign State Behavior – Survey Experimental Evidence on Reciprocal Defection from Switzerland (R&R)
[Link to Manuscript] Abstract

For a long time, scholars and public debate alike identified the structure of the climate crisis as a collective action problem as the predominant challenge to effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Recent scholarly work, however, proposes that existing evidence is not consistent with collective action being the binding constraint (Akling and Mildenberger 2020) – a claim that Kennard and Schnakenberg (2023) revisit and challenge. We bring new evidence to this question, drawing on data from a high-quality population representative survey experiment with the Swiss citizenry (N=3502), focusing on whether and to what extent citizens react to signals of large foreign countries defecting from climate policy as agreed under the Paris agenda. Our survey-experimental approach allows us to work with counterfactual scenarios to identify this effect. We show that foreign state behavior matters for preferred domestic climate policy ambition levels; in particular, defection is reciprocated strongly, even among subgroups likely to show a potential counterbalancing logic. Importantly, ego- or sociotropic concerns for economic losses with the green transformation strongly increase this taste for reciprocal defection. Altogether, this indicates that the perspective of collective action theory should not be discarded as a relevant constraint for effective climate policy.

Citizen’s Resolve Against Autocratic Aggression: Survey Experimental Evidence from Five NATO Countries on Supporting Ukraine (R&R)
(with F. Haggerty and P. Thurner)
[Link to Manuscript] Abstract

The Russian war on Ukraine constitutes an attack on a sovereign country in clear violation of international law — a bad omen for autocratic challenges to the liberal, rule-based order promoted by Western democracies. Are Western democracies ready for this challenge? Their governments attempt to commit themselves to assist Ukraine for `as long as it takes‘. We argue that the credibility of such announcements and the ability of Western governments to provide long-term economic and military support depends on the extent of resolve of their respective electorates. Building on the literature on support for war, we are the first to study citizens‘ multidimensional assessments of the conditions and risks of supporting Ukraine. With support for Ukraine being increasingly politicized within the US and European countries, how reliable is the backing of Ukraine among the mass public of the top 5 supporters (US, UK, Germany, Italy, and France)? Drawing on conjoint and vignette survey experiments (N=10,000), we provide comparative evidence for populations split on this issue. On average, the full self-determination of Ukraine prevails in citizens‘ assessments but is not unconditional: strategic risks and the human, but not economic, costs of war are relevant constraints. However, around a quarter of the population does not care about outcomes for Ukraine — while another quarter shows unconditional support. These results indicate limits to strong resolve against autocratic challenges inherent to the set-up of decision-making in liberal democracies, informing current policy debates.

Selecting Good Types or Holding Incumbents Accountable? Evidence from Reoccurring Floods
Abstract

A growing literature draws on natural disasters to assess how voters hold governments accountable and finds that good management benefits incumbents. This suggests that voters see disaster management as a test case that acts as an information shock, revealing unobserved incumbent quality. Theoretically, this depends on the perception and attribution of incumbent responsibility. Additionally, past experience with exposure should moderate voters’ appraisal, as should the current level of esteem the incumbent holds. I provide evidence that the electoral response to disaster management is heterogeneous along these dimensions. Drawing on the exceptional case of four centennial floods in Germany, occurring within a decade and right before elections, I show that exposure leads to vote gains for federal and state incumbents. The response of indirectly affected voters indicates strong ‘demonstration effects’. I then discuss evidence that explains heterogeneity across the floods. Overall, the case allows to infer whether voters select prospectively or retrospectively.

‚People Like Us‘: Empathy and Acceptance of Climate Migrants in Rural Bangladesh (under review) (with L. Hormuth, J. Freihardt, and V. Koubi)
[Link to Manuscript] Abstract

As climate change intensifies, internal migration due to climate extreme events is becoming increasingly common in the Global South. Yet, little is known about how rural host communities respond to environmental migrants. This study investigates attitudes towards internally displaced environmental migrants in northern Bangladesh, focusing on three key mechanisms: perceived deservingness, empathy through geographic and experiential proximity, and personal contact. We draw on a pre-registered, face-to-face survey with 265 rural respondents. At the core of our survey is a forced-choice conjoint experimental design (N=936) to causally assess how different migrant characteristics — including reason for migration, occupation, religion, and distance from origin — influence host preferences. Findings show that migrants displaced by riverbank erosion are significantly more likely to be accepted than economic migrants, reflecting a strong role for deservingness in shaping attitudes. Environmental displacement also attenuates discrimination based on other migrant attributes, such as religion, occupation, and distance of migrant origin. Respondents who experienced similar environmental hardships, such as erosion-induced house loss, expressed the strongest preferences for environmentally displaced migrants, supporting the empathy mechanism. In contrast, simple exposure to in-migrants in the village had no measurable effect on attitudes, challenging assumptions about the universal benefits of intergroup contact. Our study extends the migration attitudes literature by focusing on internal, rural-to-rural displacement in a climate-vulnerable context. These findings highlight how moral judgments and experiential proximity can foster inclusive attitudes even in resource-constrained settings, with important implications for societal resilience under climate change.

Inequality and Immigration Do Not Necessarily Increase Welfare Chauvinism – A Replication of Two Influential Studies (research-led teaching project, LMU Munich) (under review) (with J. Geith, A. Passer-Jähnel, and S. Rueß)
[Link to Manuscript] [Pre-Registration] Abstract

How do inequality and immigration affect support for redistribution? We study this question in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has elevated the salience of redistributive policies and decreased the salience of immigration. We build upon studies of Magni (2021) and Alesina, Miano and Stantcheva (2023) that showed that priming respondents on inequality or immigration can link to preferences for redistribution (the former positively, the latter negatively) and increase welfare chauvinism. We revisit these claims drawing on survey-experimental primes in a quota-representative sample of around (N=1.587) German citizens. Our findings are partly contrary to prior evidence, underlining that previous studies may be context-dependent on times of exceptionally high immigration salience.

Maximize Power: Online Survey Panels and the Price-Quality Trade-Off (under review) (with L. Seelkopf)
[Link to Manuscript] Abstract

The use of survey-experimental research with online access panels provided by marketing research companies has grown significantly in the social sciences. These panels offer rapid access to quota-representative samples, enabling generalizable findings alongside causal inferences. However, researchers face a wide range of pricing options, with higher-priced companies often claiming superior quality in terms of respondent attentiveness, honesty, and representativity beyond quota characteristics. This creates a potential trade-off between sample quality and the statistical power achievable within a given research budget. Our study examines this trade-off within the context of Germany, the largest economy in Europe. We solicited bids from all marketing research companies operating in the German market to conduct survey-experimental research. From these, we selected three companies representing low, medium, and high price points, each corresponding to self-reported panel quality. Using identical vignette, priming, and conjoint experiments, along with standard socio-demographic and attitudinal measures relevant to political behavior research, we compared the outcomes across these quota-representative samples. Our findings suggest that for experimental designs, the trade-off between price and quality is less pronounced than commonly assumed. Based on this evidence, we recommend prioritizing statistical power by minimizing costs per respondent.

Work in progress (original survey data collection completed)

Mass Public Preferences Regarding Arms Exports Among Top-5 Democratic Exporters (with F. Haggerty and P. Thurner)

Floods and Democratic Accountability – Evidence from Bangladesh

Validating Vignette Experiments – Survey and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

The Uncertain Consequences of Saving the Climate: Ego- and Sociotropic Preferences for Green Taxes (with L. Seelkopf)

Two-Column Ballot Designs and Candidate Order Effects (with S. Shikano) [Pre-Registration]