Pepinsky, Goodman, and Ziller (2024, American Political Science Review, PGZ) reassess a recent study on the long-term consequences of concentration camps in Germany. The authors conclude that accounting for contemporary (i.e., post-treatment) state heterogeneity in the models provides unbiased estimates of the effects of camps on current-day outgroup intolerance. In this note, we show that PGZ’s empirical strategy rests on (a) a mischaracterization of what regional fixed effects capture and (b) two unrealistic assumptions that can be avoided with pre-treatment state fixed effects. We further demonstrate that results from the original article remain substantively the same when we incorporate regional fixed effects correctly. Finally, simulations reveal that camp proximity consistently outperforms spatially correlated noise in this specific study. The note contributes to the growing literature on legacy studies by advancing the discussion about the correct modeling choices in this challenging field.

Research shows that sexist attitudes are deeply ingrained, with adverse consequences in the socioeconomic and political sphere. We argue that parental leave for fathers—a policy reform that disrupts traditional gender roles and promotes less stereotypical ones—has the power to decrease attitudinal gender bias. Contrasting the attitudes of new parents who were (and were not) directly affected by a real-world policy reform that tripled the amount of fathers’ leave, we provide causal evidence that the reform increased gender-egalitarian views in the socioeconomic and political domains among mothers and fathers, and raised support for pro-female policies that potentially displace men among mothers. In contrast, informational, indirect exposure to the reform among the general public produced no attitudinal change. These results show that direct exposure to progressive social policy can weaken sexist attitudes, providing governments with a practical and effective tool to reduce harmful biases.

Growing attitudinal and affective differences across party lines and increasing social polarization are often attributed to the strengthening of partisanship as a social identity. Scholars have paid less attention to personal preferences as a contributor to these phenomena. Our focus is on how citizens’ policy beliefs—their operational ideologies—are associated with their views of partisan groups. We examine our perspective with two studies. In the first, we find that the attribution of ideologically extreme political views to an individual's peer significantly reduces interest in interpersonal interaction but find limited evidence that partisan group membership alone induces social polarization. In the second, we show that citizens’ policy views are strongly associated with their perceptions of their own partisan group as well as their counterpartisans. Together, our results have important implications for understanding the consequences of increased polarization and partisan antipathy in contemporary politics.

We explore the long-term political consequences of the Third Reich and show that current political intolerance, xenophobia, and voting for radical right-wing parties are associated with proximity to former Nazi concentration camps in Germany. This relationship is not explained by contemporary attitudes, the location of the camps, geographic sorting, the economic impact of the camps, or their current use. We argue that cognitive dissonance led those more directly exposed to Nazi institutions to conform with the belief system of the regime. These attitudes were then transmitted across generations. The evidence provided here contributes both to our understanding of the legacies of historical institutions and the sources of political intolerance.

This article explores (1) whether policy makers are equally responsive to the preferences of women and men and (2) whether the increased presence of women in parliament improves responsiveness to women’s preferences. Using a time-series cross-sectional analysis of 351 party shifts by sixty-eight different parties across twelve Western European countries, the study finds that parties respond to the preference shifts of women and men. However, parties are more responsive to the preference shifts among men than among women – a finding that is not affected by the share of female politicians in parliament. The findings question the implicit assumption that substantive political representation of women necessarily follows from their descriptive representation in legislatures.

Researchers studying discrimination and bias frequently conduct experiments that use racially distinctive names to signal race. The ability of these experiments to speak to racial discrimination depends on the excludability assumption that subjects’ responses to these names are driven by their reaction to the individual’s putative race and not some other factor. We use results from an audit study with a large number of aliases and data from detailed public records to empirically test the excludability assumption undergirding the use of racially distinctive names. The detailed public records allow us to measure the signals about socioeconomic status and political resources that each name used in the study possibly could send. We then reanalyze the audit study to see whether these signals predict legislators’ likelihood of responding. We find no evidence that politicians respond to this other information, thus providing empirical support for the excludability assumption.