How does personal experience shape views on welfare spending?

The Great Recession, coupled with concerns over the growing budget deficit, resulted in a renewed debate about the social safety net. While support for welfare benefits usually splits along partisan lines, Yotam Margalit examines how personal experiences of hardship during the financial crisis affected attitudes towards social spending. While he finds that first-hand experience of a job loss does lead to a convergence in the welfare preferences of left and right-leaning voters, the data suggest that the changes in the welfare attitudes of the job losers are fairly short-lived, dissipating soon after they find new employment. Overall, the first four years of the Great Recession are found to have brought about a drop in the public’s support for welfare spending

Unions don’t just channel the political preferences of their workers, they influence them as well.

Despite their decline in recent years, unions still play a major role in state and national politics. But are unions able to influence the views of their members, or do those who join unions simply have differing views compared to non-members? In new research surveying more than 4,000 workers across 12 industries, Sung Eun Kim and Yotam Margalit find that unions serve as information providers for the members, and that when it comes to trade policy, they do have a clear influence on their members’ views

The political consequences of green policies: evidence from Italy

For many governments, enacting green policies is a priority, but such policies often impose on citizens substantial and uneven costs. How does the introduction of green policies affect voting? We study this question in the context of a major ban on polluting cars introduced in Milan, which was strongly opposed by the populist right party Lega. Using several inferential strategies, we show that owners of banned vehicles— who incurred a median loss of €3,750—were significantly more likely to vote for Lega in the subsequent elections. Our analysis indicates that this electoral change did not stem from a broader shift against environmentalism, but rather from disaffection with the policy’s uneven pocketbook implications. In line with this pattern, recipients of compensation from the local government were not more likely to switch to Lega. The findings highlight the central importance of distributive consequences in shaping the political ramifications of green policies

How America's politics influence how we do business and who we want to work for

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, America's partisan divide has become even more apparent, with more and more people feeling that they actively dislike members of the opposite party. In new research, Christopher McConnell, Yotam Margalit, Neil Malhotra and Matthew Levendusky find that this negativity also extends to work and other business relationships. Not only are people willing to accept less pay from an employer who shares their party affiliation, they are also more likely to buy from sellers who are similar

Visualization of Topological Boundary Modes Manifesting Topological Nodal-Point Superconductivity

The extension of the topological classification of band insulators to topological semimetals gave way to the topology classes of Dirac, Weyl, and nodal line semimetals with their unique Fermi arc and drum head boundary modes. Similarly, there are several suggestions to employ the classification of topological superconductors for topological nodal superconductors with Majorana boundary modes. Here, we show that the surface 1H termination of the transition metal dichalcogenide compound 4Hb-TaS2, in which 1T-TaS2 and 1H-TaS2 layers are interleaved, has the phenomenology of a topological nodal point superconductor. We find in scanning tunneling spectroscopy a residual density of states within the superconducting gap. An exponentially decaying bound mode is imaged within the superconducting gap along the boundaries of the exposed 1H layer characteristic of a gapless Majorana edge mode. The anisotropic nature of the localization length of the edge mode aims towards topological nodal superconductivity. A zero-bias conductance peak is further imaged within fairly isotropic vortex cores. All our observations are accommodated by a theoretical model of a two-dimensional nodal Weyl-like superconducting state, which ensues from inter-orbital Cooper pairing. The observation of an intrinsic topological nodal superconductivity in a layered material will pave the way for further studies of Majorana edge modes and its applications in quantum information processing.N.A., H.B., and B.Y acknowledge the German–Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF grant no. I-1364-303.7/2016). H.B. and N.A. acknowledge the European Research Council (ERC, project no. TOPO NW), B.Y. acknowledges financial support by the Willner Family Leadership Institute for the Weizmann Institute of Sci- ence, the Benoziyo Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Science, the Ruth and Her- man Albert Scholars Program for New Scientists, and the Israel Science Foundation (ISF 1251/19). G.A.F. gratefully acknowledges partial support from the National Science Foun- dation through NSF Grant no. DMR-1720595, and DMR-1949701. Y.O. acknowledges partial support through the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement LEGOTOP No 788715), the ISF Quantum Science and Technology (2074/19), the BSF and NSF (2018643), and the CRC/Transregio 183. A.K. acknowledges the Israel Science Foundation (ISF 320/17).Center for Dynamics and Control of Material

Replication Data for: Informed Preferences? The Impact of Unions on Workers' Policy Views

Despite declining memberships, labor unions still represent large shares of electorates worldwide. Yet their political clout remains contested. To what extent, and in what way, do unions shape workers’ political preferences? We address these questions by combining unique survey data of American workers and a set of inferential strategies that exploit two sources of variation: the legal choice that workers face in joining or opting out of unions and the over-time reversal of a union’s policy position. Focusing on the issue of trade, we offer evidence that unions influence their members’ policy preferences in a significant and theoretically predictable manner. In contrast, we find that self-selection into membership accounts at most for a quarter of the observed “union effect”. The study illuminates the impact of unions in cohering workers’ voice and provides insight on the role of information provision in shaping how citizens form policy preferences