ARTICLES

2022 “Cognitive-motivational Mechanisms of Political Polarization in Social Contexts” (with J. Jost and J. Druckman) Nature Reviews Psychology.

ABSTRACT: Healthy democratic polities feature competing visions of a good society but also require some level of cooperation and institutional trust. Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an ‘us versus them’ mentality dominates. Despite a vast multidisciplinary literature, no coherent conceptual framework of the microlevel dynamics that increase or decrease polarization has been presented. In this Review, we provide a conceptual framework to integrate scientific knowledge about cognitive–motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted. Ego-justifying and group-justifying motives lead individuals to defend their own pre-existing beliefs and those of their in-group, respectively. However, a distinct class of system-justifying motives contributes to asymmetric forms of polarization. Whereas conservative-rightist ideology is associated with valuing tradition, social order and maintenance of the status quo, liberal-leftist ideology is associated with a push for egalitarian social change. These cognitive–motivational mechanisms interact with social influence processes linked to communication source, message and channel factors, all of which might contribute to increased or decreased polarization. We conclude with a discussion of unanswered questions and ways in which our framework can be extended to the study of culture and institutions.

2022 “Everyday Discrimination in Public Spaces: A Field Experiment in the Milan Metro” (with N. Zhang and J. Gereke), European Sociological Review.

ABSTRACT: A large scholarship documents discrimination against immigrants and ethnic minorities in institutional settings such as labour and housing markets in Europe. We know less, however, about discrimination in informal and unstructured everyday encounters. To address this gap, we report results from a large-scale field experiment examining the physical avoidance of immigrants as an unobtrusive yet important measure of everyday discrimination in a multiethnic European metropolis. In addition to varying confederates’ migration background and race, we also vary signals of status (business versus casual attire) in order to shed light on the mechanisms underlying discriminatory patterns. We find that natives are averse to contact with Nigerian confederates, but do not discriminate against Chinese confederates. Furthermore, manipulating confederates’ attire has little effect on natives’ behaviour. Overall, our results highlight the everyday burdens borne particularly by individuals of African descent in commonplace, ‘street-level’ encounters.

2021 “Immigration, integration and cooperation: experimental evidence from a public goods game in Italy” (with J. Gereke and M. Schaub), Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

ABSTRACT: Immigration has rapidly changed the demographic profile of most Western European societies, increasing their ethnic diversity. Some cross-disciplinary literature comparing homogeneous and diverse communities provides observational evidence of a link between high levels of ethnoracial diversity and lower levels of public goods provision. While these results are often interpreted as driven by context/interaction effects, whereby individuals lower their cooperativeness in response to the presence of non-coethnics, they could also be explained by composition effects – immigrants having different baseline levels of cooperativeness, and thereby lowering average cooperation rates. To disentangle these effects, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with a sample of Italians and immigrants from Morocco and the Philippines residing in Milan. In our public goods experiment, participants were randomly assigned to either homogeneous or ethnically mixed groups. We find that Italians behave similarly in both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups, thus contradicting arguments about the negative effects of diversity on the native population, while there are both compositional and interactional effects when considering the behaviour of Moroccan and Filipino immigrants, respectively. Moreover, differences largely disappear when we consider only the behaviour of more socio-economically integrated immigrants, highlighting the need for a more processual understanding of cooperation in multiethnic communities.

2021 “People use both heterogeneity and minority representation to evaluate diversity,” (with M. Abascal and J. Xu), Science Advances, Sci. Adv. 7, eabf2507 (2021).

ABSTRACT: The term “diversity,” although widely used, can mean different things. Diversity can refer to heterogeneity, i.e., the distribution of people across groups, or to the representation of specific minority groups. We use a conjoint experiment with a race-balanced, national sample to uncover which properties, heterogeneity or minority representation, Americans use to evaluate the extent of racial diversity a neighborhood and whether this assessment varies by participants’ race. We show that perceived diversity is strongly associated with heterogeneity. This association is stronger for Whites than for Blacks, Latinos, or Asians. In addition, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians view neighborhoods where their own group is largest as more diverse. Whites vary in their tendency to associate diversity with representation, and Whites who report conservative stances on diversity-related policy issues view predominately White neighborhoods as more diverse than predominately Black neighborhoods. People can agree that diversity is desirable while disagreeing on what makes a community diverse.

2020 “Diversity and Prosocial Behavior”, (with M. Abascal), Science, September 4, 1183-1187.

ABSTRACT: Immigration and globalization have spurred interest in the effects of ethnic diversity in Western societies. Most scholars focus on whether diversity undermines trust, social capital, and collective goods provision. However, the type of prosociality that helps heterogeneous societies function is different from the in-group solidarity that glues homogeneous communities together. Social cohesion in multiethnic societies depends on whether prosocial behavior extends beyond close-knit networks and in-group boundaries. We identify two features of modern societies—social differentiation and economic interdependence—that can set the stage for constructive interactions with dissimilar others. Whether societal adaptations to diversity lead toward integration or division depends on the positions occupied by minorities and immigrants in the social structure and economic system, along with the institutional arrangements that determine their political inclusion.

2020 “Market integration accounts for local variation in generalized altruism in a nationwide lost-letter experiment” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(6), 2858-2863.

ABSTRACT: What explains variation in levels of prosocial behavior across communities? And are members of the ingroup and outgroup treated differently? According to evolutionary theories of generalized altruism, market integration should lead to greater levels of prosociality […]. Moving away from the evolutionary focus on cross-cultural variation, this article uses the market- integration hypothesis to explain intracultural variation in levels of prosociality in an advanced society. Taking advantage of an ideal setting, this study reports results from a large-scale, nation- wide lost-letter experiment in which 5,980 letters were dispersed in a sample of 188 Italian communities. […]

2020 “Strangers in Hostile Lands: Exposure to Refugees and Right-wing Support in Germany’s Eastern Regions”. (with M. Schaub and J. Gereke), Comparative Political Studies, 1-32.

ABSTRACT: Does local exposure to refugees affect right-wing support and anti-immigrant sentiments? This paper studies the allocation of refugees to the rural hinterlands of Eastern Germany during the refugee crisis of 2015. Similar to non-urban regions elsewhere, the area has seen a major shift towards the political right, despite minimal previous exposure to foreigners. We draw on electoral records and original data collected among 1,320 German citizens from 236 municipalities, half of which received refugees. Two conditions allow for causal identification: a policy allocating refugees following strict administrative rules, and a matching procedure rendering treated and control municipalities statistically indistinguishable. Our survey and behavioral measures confirm the presence of widespread anti-immigrant sentiments, but these are entirely unaffected by the presence of refugees in respondents’ hometowns. If anything,local exposure to refugees served as a ‘reality check’, pulling both right- and left-leaningindividuals more towards the center.

2020 “Was There a Culture War? Partisan Polarization and Secular Trends in U.S. Public Opinion”, Journal of Politics. (with B. Park)

ABSTRACT: According to many scholars of public opinion, most of the fast-growing divides between Democrats and Republicans over the last few decades have taken place on moral issues. We find that the process of issue partisanship—the sorting of political preferences along partisan lines—properly accounts for public opinion dynamics in the economic and civil rights domains. However, when it comes to moral issues, the prominent change is a partisan secular trend, in which both Democrats and Republicans are adopting more progressive views, although at a different rate. While Democrats are early adopters of progressive views, Republicans adopt the same views at a slower pace. This secular change can be easily (mis)interpreted as a sign of polarization since, at the onset of the process, the gap between party supporters broadens because of the faster pace at which Democrats adopt progressive views, and only toward the end, the gap between partisan supporters decreases.

2020 “The Micro-Relations of Urban Governance: Dynamics of Patronage and Partnership”, American Journal of Sociology, 125(6): 1559-1601 (with N. Marwell and E. Marantz)

ABSTRACT: The classic urban ecological paradigm envisioned the articulation of the social organization of neighborhoods with that of the city as a whole. This article offers novel empirical evidence in support of this proposition. We analyze the microrelations of governance across two key urban domains, politics and nonprofit organizations, and identify the district-based politician as a key actor linking neighborhood-based and citywide forms of social organization. Using data of contracts allocated by city council members to nonprofits in New York City, analysis of the social network system linking these two types of actors shows two distinct relational dynamics: a patronage dynamic characterized by exclusive and long-lasting relationships between a council member and his/her local constituency and a partnership dynamic characterized by citywide relationships that are short-lived and fostered by organizational differentiation and embeddedness. Furthermore, politicians and nonprofits differently accommodate the copresence of these two models of resource allocation.

2018 “Keeping One’s Distance: Truth and Ambiguity in Social Research” Sociologica, 1/2018: 5-11.

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2018 “Ethnic diversity, poverty and social trust in Germany: Evidence from a behavioral measure of trust”, PLOS ONE, 13(7). (with J. Gereke and M. Schaub)

ABSTRACT: Several scholars have concluded that ethnic diversity has negative consequences for social trust. However, recent research has called into question whether ethnic diversity per se has detrimental effects …

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2017 “Field Experiments Across the Social Sciences” Annual Review of Sociology, 43:41-73. (with M. Abascal)

ABSTRACT: Using field experiments, scholars can identify causal effects via randomization while studying individuals and groups in their naturally occurring contexts…

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2017 " 'It could turn ugly': Selective Disclosure of Political Views and Biased Network Perception,” Social Networks, 52:1-17 [lead article]. (with S. Cowan).

ABSTRACT: This article documents individuals selectively disposing their political attitudes and the consequences of these communication patters for social influence...

ARTICLES

Delia Baldassarri