Public support for degrowth policies and sufficiency behaviours in the United States: a discrete choice experiment

Research on degrowth and its policy proposals has rapidly expanded, despite lacking empirical evidence on public perceptions. One conceptual proposition for affluent populations is that lifestyle changes, such as undertaking sufficiency-oriented behaviours, may engender degrowth policy support. Our research empirically investigated U.S. public support for degrowth policies, its relation to sufficiency behaviours, and whether a degrowth framing influenced policy support. In a pre-registered, online discrete choice experiment (N = 1012), we elicited perceptions of four commonly advocated degrowth policies - work time reductions, downscaling fossil fuel production, universal basic services, and advertising restrictions. Analyses revealed significant support for some specification of each alternative policy, especially fossil fuel caps and universal healthcare. We also found a significant positive association between sufficiency engagement and supporting fossil fuel restrictions. However, latent class analysis suggested that the link between behaviour and policy support was less consistent for socially oriented policies, and that those who supported such policies did not engage in sufficiency most frequently. Degrowth framing only significantly influenced preferences for universal healthcare. These findings suggest an appetite for advancing eco-social policies in the United States but point to a nuanced relationship between sufficiency lifestyles and degrowth policy support

Music and the politics of famine: everyday discourses and shame for suffering

Understanding the politics of famine is crucial to understanding why famines still occur. A key part of this is how famine is remembered, understood, and discussed. This paper focuses on songs popular among communities that have recently experienced deadly famine. Contemporary famines almost always manifest in armed conflict contexts, where there is limited political freedom. Here, songs and music can be an important way to debate sensitive political issues. This paper focuses on the way that songs and music shape ‘regimes of truth’ around famine, and who is shamed and held accountable for associated suffering. It is based on long-term ethnographic research, the recordings of famine-related songs, and collaborative analysis in Jonglei and Warrap States (South Sudan) in 2021–24. The paper shows how songs can mock soldiers for their seizing of assets during times of hunger and how they can create familial shame for famine suffering, shifting responsibility away from the real causes to family members

Seeking or ignoring ethical certifications in consumer choice

Consumers often encounter, and claim to care about, ethical information concerning the products they purchase. Across three studies, we investigate how the accessibility of this information impacts choice. When consumers must seek out product attribute information, the impact of ethical certifications (Fairtrade and Organic) is diminished relative to other attributes. Both positive and negative framing of certifications increase their impact on choice relative to neutral frames, with negative frames having the strongest effect. However, in contrast to theories of information demand that would predict more willful ignorance of negatively framed content, negative framing has the same impact regardless of information accessibility. Together, our findings suggest that having to seek ethical certification information leads to a small reduction in the use of certifications to guide choice, but that affective framing has a larger impact on the weight placed on certifications in consumer choices regardless of the accessibility of information

Structural stigmatisation of abortion in the health system: perspectives of abortion care-seekers, providers, managers, and funders in England and Wales

Abortion has been legally permitted in England and Wales for over fifty years, yet this health service continues to be stigmatised within the health system. Stigma is a dominant focus of abortion research, but a structural stigma framework is rarely used to understand how abortion stigma is produced at a macro-level. This study explored how structural abortion stigma is produced and experienced in the health systems of England and Wales, and its influence on person-centred care, including choice of abortion methods. Data from in-depth interviews with abortion care-seekers in 2022–23 and from key informant interviews with abortion care providers, managers, and commissioners in 2021 were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. From the perspectives of key informants, structural abortion stigma is produced through the avoidance of abortion by decision-makers, the permitting of conscientious objection, and the exclusion of abortion from mainstream healthcare. These factors create health system pressures which increase abortion service fragility. The resulting vulnerability of abortion services reduces access to person-centred care, including abortion method choice, which can reinforce individual-level stigma. There are tensions between care-seekers’ experiences of specialist abortion care as less stigmatising, while the ‘abortion clinic’ becomes a site of stigma due to its segregation from mainstream healthcare. This research contributes to a structural understanding of abortion stigma by identifying some of the mechanisms through which structural stigma is produced within health system institutions, and how these forms of institutional stigma might be resisted or dismantled. Power is essential to the (re)production of structural stigma within the health system, which can reinforce individual-level stigma for both care-seekers and providers. Restrictions on method choice and the increasing reliance on medication abortion can be a product of structural abortion stigma, and these limitations on method choice can also reproduce stigma at the individual level

Barriers to humanitarian migration, victimization and integration outcomes: evidence from Germany

Asylum seekers who migrate from developing countries to Europe frequently experience victimization events during their journey. The consequences of these events for their economic integration into destination countries are not yet well explored. In this paper, we analyze how victimization during asylum seekers’ journeys affects their labor market integration in Germany by using survey data collected in the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis. Our data allow us to account for the exact timing and geography of migration, such that samples of physically victimized and nonvictimized refugees are balanced along a wide range of characteristics. We find that, compared to nonvictimized refugees, refugees who were physically victimized during their journey to Germany favor joining the labor force and taking up low-income employment rather than investing in host country human capital. To explain these findings, we explore a range of potential mechanisms and find suggestive evidence that experiencing physical victimization in vulnerable situations is not only associated with a decline in mental health but also with a “loss of future orientation” among physically victimized refugees, leading them to discount future payoffs more heavily