While cross‐sectional research has consistently shown graduates are less Eurosceptic than non‐graduates, little is known about the causal role of university study in determining these attitudes, as few longitudinal studies have explored this. This study does so, providing robust causal estimates of higher education's effect on Euroscepticism through applying individual‐ and sibling fixed‐effect modelling techniques to British Household Panel and Understanding Society data from 1999–2022. Both specifications provide consistent results; suggesting university study does little to decrease Euroscepticism in the short‐run but has substantial long‐run effects. This alludes to an ‘allocation’ effect, whereby it is largely not the experience of obtaining a degree itself, but the opportunities afforded by virtue of doing so that shape attitudes towards Europe. Our novel findings not only demonstrate that within‐sibling estimates of higher education's effect can be generalised to the wider British population but also advance our understanding of the mechanisms linking education with Euroscepticism.

We conduct a laboratory experiment among male participants to investigate whether rewarding schemes that depend on work performance—in particular, tournament incentives—induce more stress than schemes that are independent of performance—fixed payment scheme. Stress is measured over the entire course of the experiment at both the hormonal and psychological level. Hormonal stress responses are captured by measuring salivary cortisol levels. Psychological stress responses are measured by self-reported feelings of stress and primary appraisals. We find that tournament incentives induce a stress response whereas a fixed payment does not induce stress. This stress response does not differ significantly across situations in which winners and losers of the tournament are publically announced and situations in which this information remains private. Biological and psychological stress measures are positively correlated, i.e. increased levels of cortisol are associated with stronger feelings of stress. Nevertheless, neither perceived psychological stress nor elevated cortisol levels in a previous tournament predict a subsequent choice between tournaments and fixed payment schemes, indicating that stress induced by incentives schemes is not a relevant criterion for sorting decisions in our experiment. Finally, we find that cortisol levels are severely elevated at the beginning of the experiment, suggesting that participants experience stress in anticipation of the experiment per se, potentially due to uncertainties associated with the unknown lab situation. We call this the novelty effect.

Altruistic punishment is often thought to be a major enforcement mechanism of social norms. I present experimental results from a modified version of the dictator game with third-party punishment, in which third parties can remain ignorant about the choice of the dictator. I find that a substantial fraction of subjects choose not to reveal the dictator’s choice and not to punish the dictator. I show that this behavior is in line with the social norms that prevail in a situation of initial ignorance. Remaining ignorant and choosing not to punish is not inappropriate. As a result, altruistic punishment is significantly lower when the dictator’s choice is initially hidden. The decrease in altruistic punishment leads to more selfish dictator behavior only if dictators are explicitly informed about the effect of willful ignorance on punishment rates. Hence, in scenarios in which third parties can ignore information and dictators know what this implies, third-party punishment may only ineffectively enforce social norms.

We conducted a series of field experiments to investigate the ability of experimentally measured risk preferences to predict the contractual choices of workers in the real labour market. In a first set of experiments we twice measured workers’ risk preferences using the lottery approach of Holt and Laury (Am Econ Rev 92(5):1644–165, 2002). These workers subsequently participated in a contract-choice experiment, making 12 decisions. For each decision, the worker chose between his/her regular piece-rate contract and a particular fixed wage contract, each distinguished by the level of the fixed wage. One of the twelve decisions was then chosen at random and the worker was paid according to his/her choice for that decision over a period of two working days. We estimate the effect of risk preferences on contractual choices, controlling for measurement error and worker ability. Risk preferences effectively predict contract choices—risk-averse workers are more likely to select fixed-wage contracts. High-ability workers prefer piece-rates.

I survey the literature post Ledyard (Handbook of Experimental Economics, ed. by J. Kagel, A. Roth, Chap. 2, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995) on three related issues in linear public goods experiments: (1) conditional cooperation; (2) the role of costly monetary punishments in sustaining cooperation and (3) the sustenance of cooperation via means other than such punishments. Many participants in laboratory public goods experiments are “conditional cooperators” whose contributions to the public good are positively correlated with their beliefs about the average group contribution. Conditional cooperators are often able to sustain high contributions to the public good through costly monetary punishment of free-riders but also by other mechanisms such as expressions of disapproval, advice giving and assortative matching.

A statistical model for interpreting psychological scaling research, based on the heuristic work of Reynolds (1983), is developed. This new approach has certain advantages over the standard property fitting approach (Chang and Carroll, 1969) currently used to interpret multidimensional scaling spaces (Shepard, 1962; Torgerson, 1965). These advantages are (a) the ability to directly assess the correspondence of a descriptor vector(s) to a symmetric matrix, and (b) to provide a method in which only ordinal properties of such descriptors are required: thus standard rating, ranking, or sorting data collection methods can be used as the basis to interpret the multidimensional space resulting from the distance data.

This paper analyzes inequities in the distribution of air pollution in Mexico at the detailed scale of localities. We find that air pollution increases in areas that experience a decline in socioeconomic status. We utilize 15 years of remote sensing data on fine particulate matter (smaller than 2.5 microns) for more than 116,500 localities across Mexico. Our panel data models show that localities that face a decline in socioeconomic status experience a 0.24–0.83 per cent increase in annual mean pollution concentrations. Our results hold up to controlling for changes within each municipality and instrumenting with broader municipality level socioeconomic status to test for ecological fallacy. We find that local air pollution inequities are reduced by political participation channels, but not as much by increased share of manufacturing activities due to polluters locating in poorer neighborhoods. Highly dense, urban municipalities witness higher inequities most likely due to traffic, construction, and agricultural fires.

Despite the Supreme Court’s lack of direct electoral accountability, voters may factor its outputs into their voting decisions because elected representatives can affect the Court’s powers and composition. In this paper, we uncover an ironic predicament that faces candidates running on reforming this institution. Citizens who possess higher levels of diffuse support for the Court are more likely to rank it as an important factor in their voting logic. But because this diffuse support has sorted along partisan lines, candidate messaging about reform may not motivate partisans who have lost support for the Court because they view it as less important than other pressing issues. Thus, although Democrats are sympathetic to reform, Democratic candidates may have weak incentives to promote reform given low levels of diffuse support among their constituents. This dynamic mitigates against the possibility of a public or congressional backlash against the Court, preserving the status quo.

Recent political science literature notes that the relationship between religion and politics is not a one-way interaction: religion influences political beliefs and political beliefs influence religious practices. Most of these studies, however, have relied on aggregate or indirect methods of assessing individual-level religious decisions of where to attend worship services. This paper utilizes an original, nationally representative survey conducted through YouGov to directly ask about respondents' views on politics in church and how it influences their religious behaviors. We find that many respondents admit church shopping, both inside and outside of their denomination, and that politics influences their choice of congregation to attend. After examining the demographics of those who church shops for political reasons, we conclude by discussing the implications of religiopolitical sorting for tolerance and partisan reinforcement.

A growing body of research connects Christian nationalism—a preference for a religiously conservative political regime—to social and political beliefs. This paper raises questions about the validity of a popular scale used to measure those attitudes. I begin by exploring the factor structure of the six-item Christian nationalism index. I then show how semi-supervised machine learning can be used to illustrate classification problems within that scale. Finally, I demonstrate that this index performs poorly at the interval level, a combination of measurement error and the sorting out of religious and political preferences. These attitudes have become so bound up in conventional politics that they often exhibit a threshold rather than a linear relationship to political preferences. I conclude with an appeal for care in matching theory to empirics: Christian nationalism is a prominent political theology, but research must grapple with the limitations of prevailing measurement tools when operationalizing it.

Two parallel processes structure American politics in the current moment: partisan polarization and the increasing linkage between racial attitudes and issue preferences of all sorts. We develop a novel theory that roots these two trends in historical changes in party coalitions. Changing racial compositions of the two major parties led to the formation of racialized images about Democrats and Republicans in people’s minds—and these images now structure Americans’ partisan loyalties and policy preferences. We test this theory in three empirical studies. First, using the American National Election Studies we trace the growing racial gap in party coalitions as well as the increasing overlap between racial and partisan affect. Then, in two original survey studies we directly measure race–party schemas and explore their political consequences. We demonstrate that race–party schemas are linked to partisan affect and issue preferences—with clear implications for the recent developments in U.S. politics.