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\"As migration to Europe has increased, so too has discrimination again immigrant populations. Countries across the EU have supported and instituted policies to force assimilation as part of a larger regional fear that immigration from Muslim majority cultures, especially, will threaten Europeans' national identities and increase the risk of radicalization. The common wisdom has been that immigrants must change their appearance, their religion, or their language in an attempt to \"pass\" as members of the majority. Through a series of innovative field experiments, the authors show that assimilationist strategies are not the only or even the best way to reduce biases: rather, discrimination is reduced when immigrants and natives share social norms that define a common identity as citizens. The core of the empirical work was done in a series of extensive, multi-year experiments in Germany--an ideal site for this work given its large immigrant population and its clearly defined cultural norms. The work showed both what animated discriminatory attitudes (cultural differences, and religious differences in particular), how this animus played out in everyday interactions (a disinclination to offer assistance to immigrant minorities, and religious Muslim immigrants in particular), and what behaviors reduce discrimination. They find--going against much conventional and even scholarly wisdom--that immigrants speaking German face as much discrimination as those using a foreign language. On the other hand, immigrants that uphold social norms (anti-littering or a progressive attitude towards women, for instance) see decreased discrimination. Ultimately, the authors offer a meticulously researched picture of what modern discrimination looks like, how it can be reduced, and the continued burden that immigrants face\"-- Provided by publisher.

Scholars have increasingly turned to fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to conduct small- and medium-N studies, arguing that it combines the most desired elements of variable-oriented and case-oriented research. This article demonstrates, however, that fsQCA is an extraordinarily sensitive method whose results are worryingly susceptible to minor parametric and model specification changes. We make two specific claims. First, the causal conditions identified by fsQCA as being sufficient for an outcome to occur are highly contingent upon the values of several key parameters selected by the user. Second, fsQCA results are subject to marked confirmation bias. Given its tendency toward finding complex connections between variables, the method is highly likely to identify as sufficient for an outcome causal combinations containing even randomly generated variables. To support these arguments, we replicate three articles utilizing fsQCA and conduct sensitivity analyses and Monte Carlo simulations to assess the impact of small changes in parameter values and the method's built-in confirmation bias on the overall conclusions about sufficient conditions.

How does representation by politicians from specific communities influence these communities’ political participation? Analyzing a natural experiment from Mexico in which a party uses lotteries to select candidates for public office, this paper presents new insights into how representation shapes the political participation of underrepresented segments of society. I find that participation in subsequent elections is significantly higher among constituents who have been represented by randomly selected legislators with a similar social background who are part of local organizational networks (embedded representatives). Furthermore, I show that these represented constituents feel more empowered and that the party that provides this “grassroots” representation is rewarded with more support in the subsequent election. The findings highlight the importance of community embeddedness for political mobilization and have important implications for debates about democratic inclusion and representation.

How do voters come to support new political parties? This article contends that new types of locally organ participant-based societal organizations—such as neighborhood associations, informal sector unions, and indigenous movements—can play a crucial mediating role in securing electoral support for new parties. Drawing on social ide and self-categorization theory, I argue that endorsements of new parties by such organizations sway the vote prefere organization members and people in their larger social networks. A discrete choice experiment, presenting voters in with campaign posters, demonstrates that organizational endorsements are highly effective in mobilizing voters, especially when voters face a new party. Endorsements can even counteract policy and ethnic differences between candidates and voters. The findings suggest an important, understudied route to partisan support in new democracies and have important implications for research on political accountability.

Why do native Europeans discriminate against Muslim immigrants? Can shared ideas between natives and immigrants reduce discrimination? We hypothesize that natives’ bias against Muslim immigrants is shaped by the belief that Muslims hold conservative attitudes about women’s rights and this ideational basis for discrimination is more pronounced among native women. We test this hypothesis in a large-scale field experiment conducted in 25 cities across Germany, during which 3,797 unknowing bystanders were exposed to brief social encounters with confederates who revealed their ideas regarding gender roles. We find significant discrimination against Muslim women, but this discrimination is eliminated when Muslim women signal that they hold progressive gender attitudes. Through an implicit association test and a followup survey among German adults, we further confirm the centrality of ideational stereotypes in structuring opposition to Muslims. Our findings have important implications for reducing conflict between native–immigrant communities in an era of increased cross-border migration.

While a number of high-level figures around the world have been prosecuted and even jailed for corruption in recent years, we know little about how such anticorruption efforts shape public opinion and patterns of political engagement. To address this question, we examine evidence from Argentina and Costa Rica involving the unprecedented sentencing of two former Presidents on corruption charges. Exploiting the coincidence in timing between these cases and fieldwork on nationally representative surveys, we find that citizens interviewed in the aftermath of these events expressed lower trust in institutions and were less willing to vote or join in collective demonstrations. Overall, these findings suggest that high-profile efforts to punish corrupt actors may have similar effects as political scandals in shaping citizens’ relationship to the political system.

Ingroup bias and outgroup prejudice are pervasive features of human behavior, motivating various forms of discrimination and conflict. In an era of increased cross-border migration, these tendencies exacerbate intergroup conflict between native populations and immigrant groups, raising the question of how conflict can be overcome. We address this question through a large-scale field intervention conducted in 28 cities across three German states, designed to measure assistance provided to immigrants during everyday social interactions. This randomized trial found that cultural integration signaled through shared social norms mitigates—but does not eliminate—bias against immigrants driven by perceptions of religious differences. Our results suggest that eliminating or suppressing ascriptive (e.g., ethnic) differences is not a necessary path to conflict reduction in multicultural societies; rather, achieving a shared understanding of civic behavior can form the basis of cooperation.

High temperatures have been linked to aggression and different forms of conflict in humans. We consider whether exposure to heat waves increases discriminatory behavior toward outgroups. Using data from two large-scale field experiments in Germany, we find a direct causal effect of exposure to heat shocks on discrimination in helping behavior. As temperature rises, German natives faced with a choice to provide help to strangers in every-day interactions help Muslim immigrants less than they do other German natives, while help rates toward natives are unaffected by temperature. This finding suggests that there may be a physiological basis for discriminatory behavior toward outgroups.

Many western liberal democracies have witnessed increased discrimination against immigrants and opposition to multiculturalism. Prior research identifies ethno-linguistic differences between immigrant and native populations as the key source of such bias. Linguistic assimilation has therefore been proposed as an important mechanism to reduce discrimination and mitigate conflict between natives and immigrants. Using large-scale field experiments conducted in 30 cities across Germany – a country with a high influx of immigrants and refugees – we empirically test whether linguistic assimilation reduces discrimination against Muslim immigrants in everyday social interactions. We find that it does not; Muslim immigrants are no less likely to be discriminated against even if they appear to be linguistically assimilated. However, we also find that ethno-linguistic differences alone do not cause bias among natives in a country with a large immigrant population and state policies that encourage multiculturalism.

The frequent emergence of new parties is a feature of democracies almost everywhere. While most of these new parties remain ephemeral, some manage to establish stable ties with voters and win substantial electoral support over repeated elections. This divergence raises the question why some new parties are able to take root in society, establish stable ties with voters, and successfully compete in elections over time, while others fail to do so. Despite a vibrant literature on both the stability of party identification and de-alignment away from traditional parties, we do not have a good understanding yet of why some new parties succeed in taking root in society, while others fail to do so. This dissertation attempts to fill this gap. It explores different paths that new parties take to build mass support, i.e. to secure electoral support and build partisan attachments in the electorate, in the context of the recent wave of party formation in Latin America. It seeks to explain how new parties come to choose different mobilization strategies and how voters in turn respond to these different party strategies. With the decline of unions, which played a central role in the historic founding of mass parties, much of the recent literature has concentrated on parties’ direct appeals to voters and explained variation in success to secure support in terms of the type of direct appeals, e.g. based on class vs. ethnic interests or identities or charismatic appeals. In this study, I consider different types of direct appeals and also explore organizationally mediated strategies, i.e. appeals that engage voters through societal organizations. I find that organizationally mediated strategies can secure electoral support very effectively and yield durable voter ties by socializing organization members into identifying with the party. Even though the mediating role that civil society organizations can play has been largely overlooked with the decline of labor unions, new types of organizations—particularly indigenous organizations, peasant unions, and informal sector unions—play similarly important roles in democratic societies today. While the existing scholarship has examined the formation of these organizations and their role in politicizing ethnic or class cleavages, little attention has been paid to the various ways in which different forms of party-organization linkages might influence vote choice and the emergence of partisanship. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I explain the adoption of different party mobilization strategies by focusing on the intra-elite dynamics during parties’ founding moments, the period before the party contests its first major election. Two features of the founding moments—one internal to the new party, the other one external to it—are key: (1) the cohesion of the coalition of party leaders and organizational allies and (2) the credibility of other attractive parties in the party system. These factors shape early-on whether a party-organization tie becomes institutionalized by adopting routinized rules and mechanisms that govern how candidates will be selected and factional disagreements will be settled. Whether party-organization ties become institutionalized, in turn, establishes whether a new party can rely on organizationally mediated strategies or is restricted to employing direct appeals only. Furthermore, I argue that the institutionalization of a linkage can provide the basis for different types of organizationally mediated strategies and resulting party structures, depending on the structure and resources of the organizational allies. In order to explain new parties’ ability to create mass support, I then focus on voters’ responses to the different party strategies, in a second step. I show that organizationally mediated appeals can help parties obtain electoral support more effectively than most types of direct appeals. Furthermore, if the underlying party-organization linkages are institutionalized, mediated appeals also yield durable voter-party ties by socializing organization members into identifying with the party itself. Drawing on social identity and self-categorization theory, I contend that societal organizations, which serve as highly relevant and immediate reference groups to their members, provide social spaces in which socialization into new parties can occur, if the organization is organically linked to a party. This argument is tested in the context of the recent wave of party formation in Latin America. My dissertation compares three major new parties, Bolivia’s MAS, Ecuador’s Alianza PAIS, and Mexico’s MORENA, with each other and with other new parties. Using a multi-method research strategy based on 24 months of fieldwork in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico, this research combines insights from over 230 in-depth interviews with representatives of parties and societal organizations with analyses of original and existing surveys, census data, and election returns, archival research, ethnographic work, and a series of novel experiments conducted in the field.