Interdisciplinary Seminar in Empirical Social Science

Dominik Stecula, Ohio State University

We Need To Talk: How Cross-Party Dialogue Reduces Affective Polarization

Americans today are affectively polarized: they dislike and distrust those from the opposing political party more than they did in the past, with damaging consequences for their democracy. This talk focuses on one strategy for ameliorating such animus: having ordinary Democrats and Republicans come together for cross-party political discussions based on a short Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Dr. Matthew Levendusky of the University of Pennsylvania. Building on intergroup contact theory, we argue that such discussions mitigate partisan animosity. Using an original experiment, we find strong support for this hypothesis – affective polarization falls substantially among subjects who participate in heterogeneous discussion (relative to those who participate in either homogeneous political discussion or an apolitical control). We also provide evidence for several of the mechanisms underlying these effects, and show that they persist for at least one week after the initial experiment. These findings have considerable importance for efforts to ameliorate animus in the mass public, and for understanding American politics more broadly.

BIO: Dominik Stecuła is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. He was previously an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University, and before that a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia. His research agenda is situated primarily in the fields of political and science communication. In his research, Stecuła analyzes both the supply and the demand side of the information environment, how it impacts public opinion formation on important societal issues, like climate change and vaccinations, and how misinformation can influence these processes. His peer reviewed articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and many others. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, PBS, NBC, and many other outlets in the US, Canada, and Poland.

Jacob Groshek, Kansas State University

Rural and Radical, Terror on X, and Social Science in the Paid-API Era

In order to better understand cleavages in public opinion, this talk reports briefly on three interrelated media research endeavors.

First, Rural and Radical is a book project where we argue that the 2024 U.S. election is a battleground of not just facts versus misinformation but also a contest of censorship versus transparency.  This book highlights the contemporary hybrid media system and the role it plays in bringing constituents together as well as the mechanisms by which democracy can be fractured and polarized with a specific focus on the rural Midwest.  Using several years of data, we examine the mythology of filter bubbles and the impact of misinformation in the heartland with qualitative interviews that explore attitudes and beliefs prevalent in red-state America, and couple those findings with AI and algorithmically filtered social media data analyses. Through research on a large geographical space that is routinely ignored but crucial to political outcomes in the US, it becomes clear that partisan hybrid media outlets fuel a growing distrust of media systems and political actors that may well contribute to a second Trump presidency.

Next, Terror on X is a working conference paper from the Midwest Political Science Association that examines a year’s worth of international news coverage of terrorist attacks on X (formerly Twitter). In this comparative approach, we use computational modeling to track the volume and sentiment filtered through millions of posts on X from three elite newspapers in the US and the UK in 2023. Here, we build on prior research using World Systems Theory to identify how the location of a terrorist attack and the identity of the perpetrator committing the attack affect media coverage of terrorism. In doing so, we update a wide swath of literature to incorporate not only extensive changes to the platform formerly known as Twitter (now X) but also media coverage of the ongoing conflicts in the Ukraine and Israel as well as which perpetrators are more often labeled as terrorists in domestic and international incidents.

Finally, Social Science in the Paid-API Era references an open special issue call for the journal Media and Communication where we address how social media data now is increasingly hard to source.  Once-free APIs and academic research platforms are mostly decommissioned or locked down by exorbitant paywalls and may also require technological expertise to access and analyze data. This situation has become more dire in recent months and has further bifurcated social media researchers into data “haves” and data “have nots”—and our field is currently adrift as to what the most viable portals and best practices for acquiring social media data are, which has resulted in isolated data vaults and fragmented efforts. Through this special issue and our own efforts at the Institute for Representation in Society and Media, we attempt to move at the pace of data to help manage an existential crisis for our field.

BIO: I have a long list of research, teaching, and industry appointments, which currently include Executive Director of the newly-formed Institute for Representation in Society and Media, the Chair of Emerging Media at Kansas State University, and as President of Metro Boston NFL Flag Football.  I am also affiliated faculty with the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University (Denmark) and served as Associate Director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Boston University.  In addition, I have also been a leading Digital Experience Management consultant at the International Data Corporation and member of the faculty at Boston University (tenured), the Toulouse School of Economics (France), the University of Melbourne (Australia), and Erasmus University (The Netherlands).

I earned my Ph.D. in media research at Indiana University Bloomington, where I specialized in applied analytics for international, political, and health communication networks and advanced econometric methods. Topically, my areas of expertise now address online and mobile media  technologies as their use may relate to sociopolitical and behavioral health change at the macro (i.e., national) and  micro (as in individual) levels. My work also include analyses of sports and media marketing content along with user influence in social media campaigns that drive engagement, participation, and revenue.

Put simply, I put my academic research to the test everyday with media marketing analytics efforts that build programs and drive millions in ongoing, annual revenue across industry verticals.  Looking for a consultant? I make it easy deploy and engage a blend of interpretive as well as relatively advanced AI-driven statistical tools for network analysis, forecasting, and explaining where and how the use of media has shaped public opinion and global events, in particular as it relates to political and health decision making.

If you are wondering, no – social media and fake news did not elect Trump, and in nearly all cases people are not trapped in ideological filter bubbles, based on the evidence my colleagues and I found in this study and this study.

A mostly up-to-date selection of my peer-reviewed publications appear below. Many are open access, but for those articles that are behind paywalls, please feel free to message me for access as well as with feedback and questions, or for media and speaking requests.  I truly love what I do, and I look forward to hearing from you to help make the world a better place.

website: https://jacobgroshek.com/

Theofilos Gkinopoulos, Jagiellonian University

Are citizens of resilient states also resilient to conspiracy theories? The association between state resilience and COVID-19, climate change related and generic conspiracy beliefs

In the era of high uncertainty and complexity, building resilient systems against threats, crises and disasters is of utmost importance. Empirical research across several decades has provided robust evidence about the important benefits of resilience on an individual level (e.g., as a personality trait or a coping strategy that individuals use to deal with personal adversities, traumas and losses). Building resilience seems to protect people from uncertainty, which is a strong predictor of believing in conspiracy theories which, in turn, function as devices that ameliorate this sense uncertainty. And this is why conspiracy theories and their endorsement flourishes in contexts of high uncertainty. While the association of individual resilience with conspiracy beliefs is already documented in the literature, much less is known about the association of conspiracy beliefs with resilience as a characteristic of states. At the moment, there is evidence showing that individuals’ high sense of resilience predicts less intentions to endorse conspiracy theories. Extending individual resilience to resilience on the level of a state has proven to be a crucial factor for effective crisis management and a yet understudied macro-level factor that can predict conspiracy beliefs. To this end, bringing the concept of state resilience to the social psychological literature of conspiracy beliefs, we conducted three studies with different sample of participants each (N = 44,318 participants nested in 51 countries, N = 298 UK participants and N = 283 UK participants). Results showed that higher scores of the state resilience index (Study 1) and higher perceived state resilience (Studies 2 and 3) predicted lower climate change related and generic conspiracy beliefs. The importance of state resilience in the social psychological and policy-making domain of misinformation is discussed. This seminar will begin with introducing the concept of state resilience as an extension of individual resilience. During the seminar, a detailed description of the country-level and individual-level measure of state resilience will be provided, as well as the reasons why a highly resilient state and, subsequently, perceptions of a state as highly resilient can be negative predictors of various types of conspiracy theories (COVID-19, climate change related, and generic conspiracy beliefs). The seminar will close with potential useful policy making recommendations regarding the crucial role of resilience on a state level as the necessary tool to fight the rise of conspiracy theories and beliefs in conditions of high uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Bio: Theofilos Gkinopoulos is an assistant professor at the Behavior in Crisis Lab-Institute of Psychology of the Jagiellonian University and a visiting lecturer in mixed methods at the University of Warsaw (Faculty of Psychology). He has obtained his BSc in Psychology from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Greece and a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Surrey (UK). He conducted postdoctoral research at the Centre for Inequalities of the University of Greenwich (UK) and the Department of Political Sciences (University of Crete). His current research focuses on understanding the intradividual and intergroup antecedents and consequences of people’s beliefs, including conspiracy beliefs, and behaviors in times of crises. He has also been guest (co)editor of three special issues on intergroup apologies, morality and social norms.

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Elias Dinas, European University Institute

The Intrusion of Value Change: Mass Media and the Normalization of Contested Issues

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Vicente Valentim, IE University

The Normalization of the Radical Right

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Aneta Piekut, University of Sheffield

Is it worth it? Sample quality in a Facebook/Meta ad-generated survey with Polish migrants in the UK

Is it worth it? Sample quality in a Facebook/Meta ad-generated survey with Polish migrants in the UK

Migrants are considered a hard-to-reach population. It is hard to recruit them due to lack of accessible sampling frames or to recruit in a timely manner if frames are available or self-constructed. Recently, Facebook (now Meta) advertisement campaigns (ads) have become an increasingly popular method of recruiting hard-to-reach populations, including migrants, due to lower costs and time efficiency. Yet, time effective survey sampling might come with risks for sample internal and external quality (representativeness). In a study on the impacts of Covid-19 on Polish migrant essential workers in the UK we conducted an online survey using both Facebook ads and standard online convenience sampling. Over a period of four weeks in 2021, we collected 1,105 valid responses and 66% of them (735) came from a dedicated Facebook ad campaign. In this talk, I review the campaign performance over time and explore different survey quality indicators, e.g. satisficing, speeding, nonresponse, and how they correlate with survey duration. Finally, I compare the sample originating from the Facebook ads with the sample coming from the convenience recruitment (370) in terms of survey quality indicators and representativeness.

Roland Imhoff, University of Mainz

The Psychology of Conspiracy Mentality

Despite an explosion of research on conspiracy theories and their underlying cognition and emotion particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, the field is still predominated by reports of eclectic and largely cross-sectional associations. The current talk will therefore demarcate the field and what is by now well established and firmly known, what is currently assumed but not yet solidly established, and where the field lacks reliable empirical insights. Starting from the non-trivial task of providing a definition of the phenomenon and the question whether conspiracy theories are necessarily false, I will discuss the notion of conspiracy mentality as a worldview underlying the endorsement of specific conspiracy beliefs and highlight its cognitive architecture. The typical normal distribution of conspiracy mentality measures will provide further opportunity to reflect on the often-premature characterization of conspiracy suspicions as erratic or deviant. Revisiting some of the basic assumptions and their respective evidence base, the outlook will focus on the major developmental tasks of conspiracy research in the near future.

BIO: Roland Imhoff is a professor for social and legal psychology at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (since 2015). His research interests span from basic social cognition topics like comparison and categorization to intergroup relations, political attitudes like conspiracy mentality, representations of history, and indirect measures of sexual interest. He has been editor-in-chief at the European Journal of Social Psychology and currently serves the European Association as Journal Officer in the Executive Committtee and Chair of the Consortium for Social Psychological and Personality Science. He is passionate about open science, vegan cooking, fermentation and his three children.

Magdalena Wojcieszak, University of California, Davis, University of Warsaw

Polarization from news? Not really. Why? Most people do not consume (partisan) (hard) news.

Populism, polarization, misinformation, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to many democracies. Although the sources of these threats are multifaceted, partisan media and the online environment are often seen as the culprit. Many observers and scholars worry that partisan news exposure and digital technologies lead to extremity and intergroup hostility.

In this presentation, I address these issues in two ways. I present two projects, each combining participants’ survey self-reports and their online behavioral browsing data. First, I focus on actual online exposure to partisan news media as well as to political content wherein to test the effects of each on attitude and affective polarization. Spoiler alert: I find robust null effects. Second, to explain these effects and offer more nuance into people’s online information diets, I examine the prevalence of (1) exposure to news domains; (2) political content within these domains; and (3) political content outside these domains in Poland, the US, and the Netherlands. I end this presentation with two innovative large scale studies (a field experiment on Twitter and an over-time experiment using a browser extension for YouTube), which aimed to incentivize citizen exposure to quality and diverse news and political content.

BIO: Magdalena Wojcieszak (Ph.D. U. of Pennsylvania), is Professor of Communication, U. of California, Davis and an Associate Researcher at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, U. of Amsterdam, where she directs the ERC EXPO Grant.

Her research focuses on how people select political information in the current media environment and on the effects of these selections on democratic attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors. She also examines the effects of mass media, new information technologies, and various messages on extremity, polarization, tolerance, and perceptions. Prof. Wojcieszak’s current work aims to identify the extent of interest- and political biases in recommendation algorithms and propose principle solutions to minimize these biases, especially in the context of promoting exposure to quality news and diverse political contents online.

Prof. Wojcieszak has (co-)authored more ~70 articles in peer-reviewed journals, is the Associate Editor of Journal of Communication, and serves on editorial boards of seven peer-reviewed journals. She has received several awards for her teaching and research (including the 2016 Young Scholar Award from the International Association of Communication).
Prof. Wojcieszak is part of the Misinformation Committee at the Social Science One, first ever partnership between academic researchers and social media platforms, and of an independent research partnership between researchers and Facebook to study the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the U.S. 2020 elections.

Monika Nalepa, University of Chicago

Incumbent and Opposition Support in Authoritarian Regimes: Survey Evidence from Late-Communist Poland

This paper analyzes two alternative explanations for attitudinal change in authoritarian regimes: the first perspective, based on Timur Kuran’s theory on preference falsification, emphasizes the importance of fear and dissimulation and argues that massive swings in public opinion can occur even in the absence of significant changes in individual preferences. The second perspective, which builds on Suzanne Lohmann’s work on informational cascades, focuses on the fact that political events can – and often do – provide important information to citizens about the “type” of both the incumbents and the opposition, which then in turn shape individual and public support for the different political camps.

We test these predictions using a unique series of eleven public opinion surveys from late-communist Poland (1985-89). Using a variety of diagnostics based on the correspondence between survey-based outcomes and official statistics, as well as the distribution of answers to sensitive political questions, we find very limited evidence of fear-based preference falsification in these surveys. We complement these diagnostics with an analysis of the link between political events of public opinion trends, and find fairly strong support in favor of the learning hypothesis, as respondents appear to use the information provided by contemporaneous political events to form/adjust their evaluations of the main political actors, much in line with Susanne Lohmann’s argument about informational cascades. In particular, authoritarian incumbents were punished for price increases and poor electoral campaigns and results but were rewarded for political liberalization measures. By comparison, we found weaker support for the type of tipping model dynamics predicted by Kuran’s framework: while political preferences did indeed shift from the incumbents to the opposition in the wake of unfavorable electoral outcomes, these changes were neither as drastic as predicted by the tipping model, nor were they limited to periods where we found evidence of new information about the distribution of societal preferences.

BIO: Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. Her next book with Cambridge University Press, published in 2022, is entitled After Authoritarianism: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability. She has also published articles in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Parliamentary Affairs, and Constitutional Political Economy.

Monika Nalepa is the Director of the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab, which produces the Global Transitional Justice Dataset.

Robert Klemmensen, Lund University

Genetic and Environmental Influences on the Stability of Political Attitudes

By now it is well established that political preferences are partly informed by heritable factors. In this paper we investigate the extent to which changes in preferences are equally like to be informed to genetic. We show, using a panel of Danish twins that genetics is not responsible for changes in political preferences which are best explain by individual twin experiences as well socialization.

Daniel Bar-Tal, Tel Aviv University

Gaza War: Antecedents, Processes and Consequences

It is assumed that the atrocities carried out by Hamas in the southern part of Israel on 7 October 2023, and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza are going to reshape both the Israeli and the Palestinian societies, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and will have a profound effect on the geopolitical structure of the Middle East. Foremost, after merely three these events have already had a great impact on the basic perceptions of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, including in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the State of Israel. To the -ever-deepening mistrust between the two sides of the conflict, one must add the devastating psychological effect the Palestinian attack on innocent Israeli civilians (including murdering, raping and the immoral kidnapping of children, women, elderly people and soldiers) has had throughout Israel.

It goes without saying that one cannot ignore the effect of the brutal Israeli response in the bombing of Gaza, killing about 22,000 people including 7000 children and over 5000 women, injuring of over 50,000 people, a displacement of over one and half million civilians within the Gaza Strip, devastation of 70% of the homes and of most of the infrastructure in Gaza and causing severe hunger and infectious diseases.

Both societies enter in a state of trauma. For the first time in more than 75 years as a state, the most horrific word in the dictionary, “Holocaust” has become a reality for the Israeli Jews. At the same time the Palestinians are outraged because of indiscriminate bombing that killed thousands of civilians, the massive expulsion from north Gaza and the devastation. Thus, they are equally traumatized as are Jews. For Palestinians, the situation reminds them of the Nakba (disaster) of the 1948.

The talk will try to explain the terrible events, to search for they wider context, and try to predict their consequences for the Israeli Jews and the Palestinians.

BIO: Daniel Bar-Tal is Professor Emeritus at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University. His research interest is in political and social psychology studying socio-psychological foundations of intractable conflicts and peace building. His most influential theoretical contribution is the development of a systematic and holistic conception of the dynamics of interethnic bloody and lasting conflicts: how they erupt, escalate and possibly de-escalate, are resolved peacefully and even reconciled. In addition, he is an authority on the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict, suggesting a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of its foundation, continuation and maintenance. Recently he began to study and write about democracy and authoritarianism. He has published over twenty-five books and over two hundred and fifty articles and chapters in major social and political psychological journals, books and encyclopedias. He served as a President of the International Society of Political Psychology and received numerous awards for his academic achievements.

Luca Varadi, Central European University

Could it be possible? Testing the Effectiveness of Interventions against Discrimination in a Divided Society: Evidence from Hungary

Ethnic prejudice can be highly contagious and an unquestioned norm in some societies, coupled with deep ethnic divides. It appears that Hungary is such a society, where Roma people face systematic exclusion and discrimination both from public institutions and private actors.

Inspired by Paluck et al.’s review of the effectiveness of interventions against prejudice and the gap they identified regarding reliable data from field experiments testing behavioural outcomes, we conducted a series of experimental studies establishing the level of discrimination and testing the effectiveness of two types of interventions in the context of anti-Roma discrimination on the Hungarian rental housing market.

In Study 1, we tested the prevalence of discrimination of Roma people in a field experiment on an online advertising platform (N=258). In Study 2, we conducted a survey experiment among landlords (N=267) to test the effectiveness of an intervention based on a short documentary and found very promising results. In Study 3 (N=57), we have aimed to test the effectiveness of our intervention by a field-experiment but have not succeeded in reaching enough subjects. In Study 4 (N=140) we tested the effectiveness of a tool aimed at spreading the norm of antidiscrimination through a field experiment with positive results.

We discuss our findings by asking the question of how interventions can be implemented tested in the real world and how they can be translated into effective policies in normative climates that do not support the equal treatment of ethnic minorities?

BIO: Luca Varadi is a former Marie Sklodowska-Curie research fellow and Assistant Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program at Central European University. Her research focuses on ethnic prejudices and especially on the formation of prejudice in adolescence.

Luca Varadi obtained her PhD in sociology at the Humboldt University in Berlin and afterwards served as a research fellow at Humboldt University and the University of Hamburg. She wrote her dissertation about the attitudes of Hungarian teenagers towards the Roma minority that was based on a survey of 1000 students. Her book, ‘Youths Trapped in Prejudice’ was published in 2014 at Springer.

Luca Varadi graduated in 2006 from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and specialized in ethnic and minority studies. Between 2006 and 2008 she was involved in research on migration and integration and worked for the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Research Institute of Ethnic and National Minorities and for the Menedék Organisation for Migrants. In Germany, she participated in the Interdisciplinary Institute for Conflict and Violence Research’s study on Group-Focused Enmity in Europe. Currently, she is working on a longitudinal study mapping the formation of common social norms in school classes and their effect on the intergroup attitudes of teenagers. Luca Váradi also works together with teachers and NGO-s to utilise research results for school-based intervention programs against prejudice.

Jonas Rees, Universitaet Bielefeld

From collective remembrance to collective forgetting: An empirical perspective on the current state of the German culture of memory

The way Germany has confronted its horrendous past and come to terms with crimes committed during the time of National Socialism is sometimes described as exemplary. And while it is true that a majority of Germans still considers dealing with the past an important task even today, many fail to name concrete historical dates and facts. Drawing on a series of representative surveys across several years, the talk develops an empirical perspective on the state of German memory culture between remembrance and forgetting.

BIO: please look at https://ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de/pers_publ/publ/PersonDetail.jsp?personId=26385901&lang=EN

Diliara Valeeva, University of Amsterdam

Threads of Power: Exploring Corporate Networks and Their Societal Impact

Power Reconfigured: Understanding Corporate Dynamics through Network Analysis

We observe drastic transitions in business power relations recently. Some of these significant shifts include the rise of BigTech giants such as Amazon and Meta, global supply chain reconfigurations following the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing trade tensions between the US and China, and an increasing emphasis on sustainable practices and corporate social responsibility, reshaping traditional business models. This talk seeks to unravel and understand the nuances of corporate power today. Through a series of case studies drawn from my research, I will demonstrate how the analysis of corporate networks provides insight into contemporary changes in power dynamics. Furthermore, the session will evolve into a workshop focused on employing social network analysis techniques to unravel power dynamics. This hands-on tutorial will guide participants through the use of network analysis software to analyze relational datasets, emphasizing key concepts like centrality, network communities, and the structural underpinnings of networks. The workshop will also foster discussions on specific case studies or research designs pertinent to network analysis.

Jonas Rees, Universitaet Bielefeld

From collective remembrance to collective forgetting: An empirical perspective on the current state of the German culture of memory

The way Germany has confronted its horrendous past and come to terms with crimes committed during the time of National Socialism is sometimes described as exemplary. And while it is true that a majority of Germans still considers dealing with the past an important task even today, many fail to name concrete historical dates and facts. Drawing on a series of representative surveys across several years, the talk develops an empirical perspective on the state of German memory culture between remembrance and forgetting.

BIO: please look at https://ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de/pers_publ/publ/PersonDetail.jsp?personId=26385901&lang=EN

Damien Stewart, LaTrobe University

Social acknowledgement and posttraumatic stress symptoms in response to historical trauma in Poland

Research conducted after WWII has identified a phenomenon known as Intergenerational Trauma (IGT) whereby generations born to traumatised WWII survivors experience similar trauma symptomology, and negative health and wellbeing effects, to the generation who first experienced the trauma. Whilst consensus does not yet exist as to the mechanism of how IGT is transmitted from one generation to another, it is likely that the mechanism is one of multi-causality. A model that offers promise in understanding the multi-causality transmission of IGT is the Socio-interpersonal Perspectives on PTSD Model (SIPPM) that considers the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and distant social levels in the transmission of IGT. From the perspective of the SIPPM, undermining the potential for social acknowledgement of collective trauma would be expected to exacerbate trauma-related symptoms.

Research conducted throughout Europe between 1999 and 2020 has identified that WWII survivors in Poland reported significantly higher levels of PTSD than those of other European countries (e.g., 10.9% in Germany compared to 38.3% in Poland). As such, the high rates of trauma among Polish survivors of WWII are very likely to have influenced the psychological well-being of their descendants. Research conducted in Poland has identified that societal disapproval, or a “conspiracy of silence”, for discussing WWII trauma due to the repressions of the communist regime that took over the country at the end of WWII, significantly predicted PTSD symptoms, depression, and lower subjective well-being among WWII Survivors, supporting the predictions of the SIPPM. However, the hypothesis of whether a lack of social acknowledgement would moderate trauma at the societal level, and the subsequent transmission of IGT, remains an open question. Thus, this presentation will present results of a study designed to explore the moderating effect of social acknowledgement on the existence and transmission of IGT in Poland.

BIO: Prior to Becoming a Psychologist, Damien was a Police Officer for 20 years serving 10 years with the Western Australian Police Service and 10 years with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in Sydney. Upon resigning from the AFP in 2012, Damien completed two master’s degrees in psychology at the University of Queensland. After graduating in 2014, Damien created Room23 Psychology and went into private practice where he currently practices from the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia. Whilst working with myriad mental health issues, Damien’s practice is highly focused on assisting current and previous serving Police & Military personnel suffering from mental health issues resulting from their career (e.g., depression, anxiety, and trauma). Damien is also a previous Convenor of the Military and Emergency Services Interest Group and is the current National Chair of the College of Sport & Exercise Psychology, both of the Australian Psychological Society. In 2022, Damien begun a PhD through La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, in conjunction with the University of Warsaw, on Intergenerational Trauma in Poland following WWII. Damien is also the Director of a Polish registered business, Poland at War Tours, a collection of tours designed to educate people on the occupation of Poland, The Holocaust, and Polish resistance during WWII.

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Paolo Grazian, University of Padua

The Politics of Ecosocial Policies. The Case of the European Green Deal

Over the past years, the debate over the need to address ecological and social concerns has grown substantially. Phenomena such as the Gilets Jaunes in France or the ecological vs. social disputes in industrial sites (such as, for example, the ILVA steel plant in Taranto) have constituted a trade-off in terms of potentially conflicting policies, making the understanding of the various underlying preferences very important. Furthermore, growing environmental concerns have challenged more traditional views anchored on the predominance of social and employment concerns. The presentation intends to contribute to the above-mentioned debate addressing the following questions: did the European Union take an ‘eco-social’ path? If so, how and why? By adopting a post-functionalist approach, the presentation illustrates the growing intertwining of social and environmental policies at the EU level and then tries to explain its genesis by focusing on the role of the various actors involved. The main argument is that the European Commission, and in particular the President of the Commission, developed an eco-social agenda and are supporting EU eco-social policies in order to obtain further institutional, political and social legitimation.

BIO: Paolo Graziano is Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua, Research Associate at the European Social Observatory, Brussels, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Surrey and Chercheur associé at Sciences Po, Paris. He held visiting positions at a number of universities, including Cornell University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Sciences Po Paris, Université Paris II Panthéon Assas, University of Melbourne, Université Libre de Bruxelles, University of Washington, Boston University, European University Institute, University of Roskilde, University of Amsterdam, University of California Berkeley.

He teaches Political Science, Political Communication and Public Management and Multilevel Governance. He has published five authored volumes and several edited volumes and journal special issues. His work on Europeanization, comparative welfare state policies, populism and political consumerism has appeared in journals such as: Policy & Society, Journal of European Public Policy, European Journal for Political Research, Government & Opposition, Governance, West European Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, International Political Science Review, Government & Opposition, Journal of European Social Policy, Journal of Social Policy, European Societies, Regional Studies, European Political Science, Social Policy and Administration, Comparative European Politics, Journal of Consumer Culture, Cities, Politique européenne, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica (Italian Political Science Review), International Journal of Social Welfare, Mediterranean Politics, Sustainability, Review of Policy Research, Public Management Review, Global Social Policy, Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche (Italian Public Policy Review).

Here is his google scholar profile with an updated list of publications: https://scholar.google.com.sg/citations?user=TnrqVyEAAAAJ&hl=it

Anna Matysiak, Faculty of Economics, University of Warsaw

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Matteo Cinelli, Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca’Foscari University of Venice

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Adam Gendźwiłł, Faculty of Geography and Regional Studies, University of Warsaw

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Esme Bosma, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam

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Tarik Abou-Chadi, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

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Theresa Kuhn, European Studies Department, University of Amsterdam

Rebordering Europe: A Difference-in-difference analysis of the effect of intra-EU border closures on EU support during the COVID-19 lockdowns

(w/ Lisa Herbig, Heike Kluever, Toni Rodon, Irene Rodriguez Lopez and Asli Unan)

A large body of research shows that Europeans who regularly interact across borders are also more supportive of European integration. Citizens cherish free movement across the EU, and cross-border interactions are also expected to increase EU support and European identity in the long term. However, extant research cannot establish whether transactions indeed lead to attitude change or simply are correlated with higher EU support. The sudden and unexpected closures of intra-EU borders in the COVID-19 lockdowns represent an unprecedented possibility to empirically test the causal effect of transnational interactions on political attitudes. We expect that the decrease in European cross-border mobility during the pandemic decreased EU support and European identity. We use difference-in-difference designs that exploits variation in the closing of Germany’s borders with neighboring countries across regions and over time to estimate the causal effect of closed borders. We rely on data on COVID-19-related mobility restrictions and border controls by the Oxford Government Response Tracker (2020) and survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate the short-term and long-term effect on citizens’ EU support.

Saskia Bonjour, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam

Strange(r) Families – Contesting the ‘Family’ and the ‘Nation’ in Migration Law

Families which include ‘strangers’ – i.e. non-citizens – require state permission to live together in Europe. For families which are considered ‘strange’ – deviant from the dominant norm – such state permission is not self-evident: queer/same-sex families or polygamous families are commonly denied family migration rights. This paper explores which kinds of families are seen to belong in Europe. These politics of belonging are intrinsically connected to the politics of intimacy. Feminist students of nationalism and empire have shown that from colonial times to the present day, defining collective identities and boundaries – be they cultural, racial, or national – inevitably involves reference to proper roles of men and women, proper dress, proper parenting, proper loving, and proper sex. Distinctions between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are most fundamentally drawn in the intimate sphere – between those who love, have sex, marry, and raise their children ‘properly’ (like ‘we’ do it) and those who do not. One of the key arenas where what counts as ‘family’ for migration control purposes may be contested is the courts, and the key actors who may do so are lawyers. Based on interviews with lawyers specialized in Dutch family migration law, we seek to identify where the contested boundaries of the ‘family’ and the ‘nation’ lie, and how these boundaries are (de)legitimated.

Ulf Liebe, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick

Explaining Re-migration Preferences: Evidence from Discrete Choice Experiments in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan

There is limited evidence and coherent theory building on re-migration decisions of returnees in low-income countries. Various factors have been proposed but largely assessed in isolation. A unified theoretical and methodological framework can help to assess the relative importance of individual factors and understand causal mechanisms. We examine an extended model of re-migration preferences based on the theoretical model proposed by Todaro & Maruszko (TM model) (1987). We derive hypotheses and test them using Discrete Choice Experiments based on samples of (irregular) migrants returning to Ethiopia (n=613), Somalia (n=233), and Sudan (n=327). We find that the TM model provides a flexible and powerful approach to explaining variation in re-migration preferences.

Bob Andersen, Departments of Sociology, Political Science, and Statistics and Actuarial Science, Ivey Business School

Trust in Business in Cross-National perspective: The role of economic inequality

This paper explores relative trust in business and labour. Employing mixed models and country-fixed effects models fitted to World Values Survey data on 212,147 individuals nested within 85 and national statistics, we assess three main research questions: 1) How does relative position in income distribution affect support for business and unions? 2) In which ways do national prosperity and inequality affect trust? Do income, inequality and economic prosperity interact to affect trust? We find that inequality has little impact when GDP high. In such cases, trust in business is relatively high regardless of one’s position in the income distribution. For poor countries, however, trust is relatively low and both individual income and country level income inequality have a positive relationship with trust in business. Put another way, the lowest income earners in the least equal countries have far greater trust in labour unions than they do in corporations.