Tracking the alignment of attitudes toward COVID containment policies and left-right self-identification

Research on opinion polarization has focused on growing divides in positions toward political issues between the more politically and ideologically engaged parts of the population. However, it is fundamentally difficult to track the alignment process between ideological group identity and issue positions because classically controversial political issues are already strongly associated with ideological or partisan identity. This study uses the COVID pandemic as an unique opportunity to investigate polarizing trends in the population. Pandemic management policies were not a politicized issue before COVID, but became strongly contested after governments all across the world initiated policies to contain the pandemic. We use data from the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP) to track trajectories in attitudes toward current COVID measures over the course of more than a year of the pandemic. We differentiate individuals by their ideological self-identity as measured by left-right self-placement. Results suggest that all ideological groups viewed the containment measures as similarly appropriate in the very beginning. However, already in the first weeks, individuals who identify as right-wing increasingly viewed the policies as too extreme, whereas centrists and left-wing identifiers viewed them as appropriate. Opinion differences between left-wing and right-wing identifiers solidified over the course of the pandemic, while centrists fluctuated between left and right self-identifiers. However, at the end of our observation period, there are signs of convergence between all groups. We discuss these findings from the perspective of theoretical models of opinion polarization and suggest that polarization dynamics are likely to stop when the political context (salience of certain issues and concrete material threats) changes

Longitudinal Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion : Mass Media, Neighborhoods and Residential Mobility

A growing strand of research in the social sciences demonstrates that social trust and other indicators of social cohesion are lower in ethnically diverse localities. This negative association has reached the status of a stylized fact, an empirical regularity that stimulates a host of empirical and theoretical work that tries to explain, contest and replicate the association. The interest in this association in sociology might be due to the fact that the implications of this broader strand of literature go beyond the local effects of ethnic diversity. They touch upon the question whether immigration affects aggregate societal integration, and thus link to a topic that is of interest to sociologists since the early beginning of the discipline. Against the backdrop of this larger scholarly debate, this thesis is part of a broader research agenda that not only empirically investigates the association between neighborhood diversity and social cohesion itself (see study III), but also focuses on the processes that surround this association. One pillar of this agenda is a focus on processes of ethnic segregation and individual residential choice that create what is later measured as neighborhood ethnic composition (see study II). A second pillar moves the debate on social cohesion to higher levels of analysis by focusing on macro-level sources of group threat such as the national media (see study I). In Study I, Mass Media and Concerns about Immigration in Germany in the 21st Century: Individual-Level Evidence over 15 Years , Christian S. Czymara and I use panel data to analyze how the attention that the topic of migration receives in the mainstream media predicts within individual changes in concerns about immigration in Germany from 2001 to 2015. A particular focus is on the question whether local ethnic composition moderates the media salience effect. In study II, I analyze White Flight for the German case. White Flight is widely known in the U.S. American literature, describing mobility flows of ethnic majority individuals out of neighborhoods with high shares of other ethnic groups. Here, I focus on one plausible mechanism for White Flight: having children. The fact that parents might change their neighborhood preferences strongly after having children is often noted in the literature, but there is still a lack of longitudinal evidence. I address this gap by relying on panel fixed-effects models to account for time-stable neighborhood and household specific traits. Study III deals with a core element of social cohesion: individual social connections to neighbors. Previous studies on the association between ethnic diversity and local social cohesion are mostly cross-sectional. Extending prior research, I add a dynamic element to the analysis: the length of residence in a neighborhood. I empirically show whether the formation of contacts with neighbors over time depends on the ethnic diversity of the neighborhood. However, asking a longitudinal research question also poses empirical challenges. As a potential means to address those issues, I propose a method to deal with possible bias due to selective mobility out of neighborhoods during the period of observation

The Gendered Effect of Parenthood on Voting Behaviour in the 2021 German Federal Election

The effect of parenthood on voting behaviour has so far been largely neglected in electoral research or is assumed to have a negligible effect. However, the 2021 German federal election campaign faced the politicisation of two main family- and children-related issues (i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change). Based on a comparison of data in the 2017 and 2021 German Longitudinal Election Study, we investigate the gendered effect of parenthood on voting behaviour. Our multinomial logistic regression analysis points to a significant parenthood effect for women during the 2021 election: women with at least one child under the age of 11 have an 8-percentage point higher probability of voting for the Greens than women without children in that age group (controlling among other things for education, age, religiosity and left-right identity). We do not find a similar effect for men. Further analyses suggest that this effect is partly due to a larger importance of climate change issues among mothers of young children. We conclude by highlighting the potential relevance of parents as an electorate force when family- and children-related issues are politicised during electoral campaigns

Catalyst of hate? Ethnic insulting on YouTube in the aftermath of terror attacks in France, Germany and the United Kingdom 2014–2017

In the last 20 years, several major terror attacks conducted in the name of political Islam hit Western Europe. We examine the impact of such terror attacks on hostile behaviour on social media from a cross-national perspective. To this end, we draw upon time-stamped, behavioural data from YouTube and focus on the frequency and popularity (‘likes’) of ethnically insulting comments among a corpus of approximately one hundred thousand comments. We study aggregate change and use individual-level panel data to investigate within-user change in ethnic insulting in periods leading up to and following major terror events in Germany, France and the UK. Results indicate that terror attacks boost interest in immigration-related topics in general, and lead to a disproportional increase in hate speech in particular. Moreover, we find that attack effects spill over to other countries in several, but not all, instances. Deeper analyses suggest, however, that this pattern is mainly driven by changes in the composition of users and not by changing behaviour of individual users. That is, a surge in ethnic insulting comes from hateful users newly entering online discussions, rather than previous users becoming more hateful following an attack

Längsschnittliche Perspektiven auf ethnische Diversität und soziale Kohäsion : Massenmedien, Nachbarschaften und rämliche Mobilität

A growing strand of research in the social sciences demonstrates that social trust and other indicators of social cohesion are lower in ethnically diverse localities. This negative association has reached the status of a stylized fact, an empirical regularity that stimulates a host of empirical and theoretical work that tries to explain, contest and replicate the association. The interest in this association in sociology might be due to the fact that the implications of this broader strand of literature go beyond the local effects of ethnic diversity. They touch upon the question whether immigration affects aggregate societal integration, and thus link to a topic that is of interest to sociologists since the early beginning of the discipline. Against the backdrop of this larger scholarly debate, this thesis is part of a broader research agenda that not only empirically investigates the association between neighborhood diversity and social cohesion itself (see study III), but also focuses on the processes that surround this association. One pillar of this agenda is a focus on processes of ethnic segregation and individual residential choice that create what is later measured as neighborhood ethnic composition (see study II). A second pillar moves the debate on social cohesion to higher levels of analysis by focusing on macro-level sources of group threat such as the national media (see study I). In Study I, "Mass Media and Concerns about Immigration in Germany in the 21st Century: Individual-Level Evidence over 15 Years", Christian S. Czymara and I use panel data to analyze how the attention that the topic of migration receives in the mainstream media predicts within individual changes in concerns about immigration in Germany from 2001 to 2015. A particular focus is on the question whether local ethnic composition moderates the media salience effect. In study II, I analyze White Flight for the German case. White Flight is widely known in the U.S. American literature, describing mobility flows of ethnic majority individuals out of neighborhoods with high shares of other ethnic groups. Here, I focus on one plausible mechanism for White Flight: having children. The fact that parents might change their neighborhood preferences strongly after having children is often noted in the literature, but there is still a lack of longitudinal evidence. I address this gap by relying on panel fixed-effects models to account for time-stable neighborhood and household specific traits. Study III deals with a core element of social cohesion: individual social connections to neighbors. Previous studies on the association between ethnic diversity and local social cohesion are mostly cross-sectional. Extending prior research, I add a dynamic element to the analysis: the length of residence in a neighborhood. I empirically show whether the formation of contacts with neighbors over time depends on the ethnic diversity of the neighborhood. However, asking a longitudinal research question also poses empirical challenges. As a potential means to address those issues, I propose a method to deal with possible bias due to selective mobility out of neighborhoods during the period of observation

Stata Code for "Ideological polarization during a pandemic: Tracking the alignment of attitudes towards COVID containment policies and left-right self-identification"

This code was used to get the results of Dochow-Sondershaus (2022) in Frontiers of Sociolgy. Among other things, it includes routines to plot spline functions smoothly with Stata's margins and marginsplot

Code for "Opinion Polarization of Immigration and EU Attitudes between Occupational Classes – The Limiting Role of Working Class Dissensus"

This page provides the R and Stata code, and the folder structure, to reproduce the results of our paper "Opinion Polarization of Immigration and EU Attitudes between Occupational Classes – The Limiting Role of Working Class Dissensus" in European Societies. Abstract of the paper: This study examines polarization in political opinions toward immigration and the European Union between occupational classes, i.e. structural polarization. We maintain that two conditions must hold to indicate structural opinion polarization: high between-class divergence and high within-class consensus. Our main contribution is to study these two conditions systematically for a wide variety of immigration and EU-related topics. Using data from four high-quality German surveys spanning three decades, we document three main findings. First, we find substantial between-class divergence: respondents in typical working class occupations express substantially more unfavorable opinions about immigration and the EU than the upper classes across the majority of survey indicators. Second, however, we also observe considerable opinion heterogeneity within the working class. This lack of within-class consensus limits the potential of mobilizing the working class as a group on the basis of anti-immigration and anti-EU sentiments. Third, while we do not document durable increases in structural opinion polarization over time across most of our opinion indicators, we do draw attention to opinions on individual topics that stand out as being most polarized relative to other issues. Overall, our results suggest limited opinion polarization between occupational classes on immigration and EU issues in Germany

Stata Code for "An investigation of the causal effect of educational expectations on school performance. Behavioral consequences, time-stable confounding, or reciprocal causality?"

This project consists of Stata Code for our 2021 paper "An investigation of the causal effect of educational expectations on school performance. Behavioral consequences, time-stable confounding, or reciprocal causality?" by Neumeyer and Dochow. The full paper can be found here (OA): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0276562420301153 Abstract: Educational expectations are core concepts in the sociology of education. In this study, we are interested in the potential behavioral consequences of expectations on school performance in early secondary education. The existing literature leads to contradictory hypotheses regarding the causal effect of expectations on achievement. On the one hand, expectations could act as cognitions steering individual behavior towards the attainment of a certain educational degree via preparatory commitment and effort. Such behavioral consequences should affect achievement in school. On the other hand, expectations could merely reflect students’ perceptions of opportunities without exerting an effect on future achievement. This paper studies these claims by relying on German panel data of students in lower secondary education. In the first set of models, we find that after adjusting for student fixed effects, expectations are only marginally related to grades and competences. In further models, we assess the role of stable high and low aspirations in explaining educational achievement trajectories. After adjusting for past grades via inverse probability weighting, achievement at the end of lower secondary education is similar between students with stable high expectations and those with stable low expectations. Taking together the results of these different modelling approaches, our study suggests that expectations are not drivers of achievement-related behavior. The paper is part of the larger project "When immigrants are aiming high: Educational achievement and attainment in light of greater aspirations", funded by the German Research foundation, and led by Prof. Dr. Cornelia Kristen, Prof. Dr. Christoph Spörlein and Dr. Gisela Will

replication package for Czymara & Dochow (2018). ESR. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcy019

Stata do files and media data for Czymara & Dochow (2018): Mass Media and Concerns about Immigration in Germany in the 21st century: Individual-level Evidence over 15 Years. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcy01

Mass Media and Concerns about Immigration in Germany in the 21st century: Individual-level Evidence over 15 Years

Mass media has long been discussed as an essential determinant of the threat perceptions leading to anti-immigration attitudes. The field of empirical research on such media effects is still comparatively young, however, and lacks studies examining precise measures of the media environment an individual is likely to be actually exposed to. We employ a nuanced research design which analyses individual differences in the yearly levels of both media salience and attitudes in panel data of 25,000 persons and a time span over 15 years, from 2001 to 2015. We find a substantive and stable positive effect: comparing periods of vivid discussions with times where the issue was hardly discussed in the German media results in an increase in the predicted probability of being very concerned by about 13 percent points. Deeper investigations reveal that the media effect is most potent for individuals living in areas with lower share of ethnic minorities and for those with lower education or conservative ideology, stressing the importance of individual receptiveness. In sum, our findings strengthen the line of reasoning stressing the importance of discursive influences on public opinion and cast doubt on the argument that threat perceptions stem primarily from the size of ethnic out-groups