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WZB Bridging Project

The bridging project "Against Elites, Against Outsiders: Sources of Democracy Critique, Immigration Critique, and Right-Wing Populism” (short: DIR) links the research units “Migration, Integration, Transnationalization” (Director: Ruud Koopmans) and “Democracy and Democratization” (Director: Wolfgang Merkel).

At the core of the institution of citizenship lies civic virtue and political participation. In the past years, there have been attempts to use technology to motivate good citizenship through the creation of a catalog of “good deeds.” Examples of good deeds include voting, assisting the elderly, seeking professional training, organizing cultural events, and undergoing self-employment workshops. According to this approach, local citizens should choose and implement a good deed from a municipal catalogue, which will be recorded and scored; based on the score, each citizen will receive a reward from a parallel catalogue of “municipal benefits.” Rewards may include free public transportation and bicycle rental, tickets to events, and reduced municipal housing.

Why do citizens vote, join political parties or take to the streets? We seek to investigate two hitherto neglected channels: influence from the past, in the form of historical victimization, and influence from abroad, in the form of diasporas. We study the case of Armenia, where recently an entrenched government was brought down by large-scale protests and strikes.

Do natural resources cause violent conflicts or do they help to appease them? The present project studies the link between artisanal gold mining and inter-tribal violence. Our evidence comes from Eastern South Sudan where tribes are engaged in constant low-level warfare, which includes systematic and deadly raids. Recent discoveries of alluvial gold deposits have meant that some areas, but not others, have witnessed a `gold rush' to exploit these deposits. Using geological and survey evidence, we test whether gold resources are associated with participation in violence. Based on qualitative interviews, we hypothesize that gold resources reduce individual participation in violence. We theorize that this reduction is due to three mechanisms.

Can the diffusion of broadband internet contribute to explaining the recent success of populist parties in Europe? Populists cultivate an anti-elitist communication style, which, they claim, directly connects them with ordinary people. The internet therefore appears to be the perfect tool for populist leaders. In this study, we show that this intuition holds up to rigorous empirical testing. Building on data from the latest national election in Italy and five regional elections in Germany, we find a positive correlation at the individual level between internet use and voting for the populist parties Movimento Cinque Stelle in Italy and Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. We address the issue of causality using an instrumental variable strategy.

How does first-time, sustained exposure to ethnic outsiders influence ingroup bias? And how does such exposure impact upon support for right-wing ideas and parties? We focus on Eastern Germany where during the 'refugee crisis' in 2015, refugees were near-exogenously allocation to some municipalities but not to others. Like other regions in Central and Eastern Europe, before 2015 Eastern German municipalities had very low numbers of foreign residents. And, similar to other regions in Europe, since then, Eastern Germany has seen a surge in support for right-wing populist parties with a pronounced anti-immigrant agenda. Can the sudden and unexpected presence of newcomers help to explain this surge?

Do ethnic riots affect pro-social behavior? A common view among scholars of ethnic violence is that riots increase cooperation within the warring groups, while cooperation across groups is reduced. We revisit this hypothesis by studying the aftermath of the 2010 Osh riot, which saw Kyrgyz from outside the city kill over 400 Uzbeks. We implement a pre-registered representative survey, which includes unobtrusive experimental measures of pro-social behavior. Our causal identification strategy exploits variation in the distance of neighborhoods to armored military vehicles, which were instrumental in orchestrating the riot. Our results demonstrate that damaged neighborhoods show substantially lower levels of pro-social behavior.

Theoretical Background

In the last years a number of research projects tried to explain the employment gaps of immigrants and their children. This line of research follows two different methodological approaches. First, a number of papers use population surveys and analyses of official statistics to show that at least part of the employment gaps of immigrants can be traced back to educational differences. However, even if one accounts for education, large gaps in employment probabilities between natives and immigrants remain.  A second strand of the literature focuses on experimental methods to investigate whether employment gaps can be explained by discrimination by employers.