Seminars 2022/2023

Anna Matysiak, Faculty of Economics, University of Warsaw

(no information available at the moment)

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

(no information available at the moment)

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

(no information available at the moment)

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

(no information available at the moment)

Tarik Abou-Chadi, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

(no information available at the moment)

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.