Max Schaub

What are the health effects of violent conflict? It is well known that wars kill civilians away from the battlefield and long after the fighting has stopped. Yet why this happens remains only partially understood. While we have good evidence that factors such as the destruction of infrastructure, political neglect, and the out-migration of health workers—what may be called supply-side factors—negatively affect health outcomes, we know much less about how violence shapes the attitudes and behavior towards healthcare use among civilians exposed to violent conflict—what may be called demand-side factors. Here, I theorize that exposure to violence suppresses civilian demand for healthcare through two mediating channels—mistrust of government institutions and fear of future violence—with adverse consequences for health outcomes, particularly child health. To test this theory empirically, I combine information from over 80,000 interviews conducted in 22 conflict-affected countries in Africa with individual- and context-level measures of exposure to violent conflict. Exposure to violence is associated with significantly lower levels of political trust and increased fear of future violence, which in turn predict lower healthcare utilization, lower immunization rates, and higher infant and child mortality. To fully address the health consequences of armed conflict, it is essential that we better understand the attitudinal and behavioral correlates of exposure to violence.

How does prosocial behavior extend beyond in-group boundaries in multiethnic societies? The differentiation of Western societies presents an opportunity to understand the tension between societal pressures that push people outside the comfort zones of their familiar networks to constructively interact with unknown, diverse others and the tendency toward homophily and in-group favoritism. We introduce a three-step model of out-group exposure that includes macro-structural conditions for intergroup encounters and micro-level dynamics of intergroup selection and interaction. Using lab-in-the-field experiments with a large, representative sample of Italian natives and immigrants from the multiethnic city of Milan, we find that, when pushed to interact with non-coethnics, Italians generally treat them similarly to how they treat coethnics and value signs of social and market integration. However, when given the opportunity to select their interaction partners, Italians favor coethnics over immigrants. Taken together, these results help reconcile classical findings concerning the positive effects of intergroup contact with evidence documenting the persistence of out-group discrimination in selection processes.

In many regions of the world, liberal politics is on the retreat. This development is usually explained with reference to inherently political phenomena. We propose an alternative explanation, linking democratic backsliding to deep-reaching demographic change caused by mass emigration. We argue that because migrants tend to be more politically liberal, their departure, if quantitatively significant, can hurt liberal democracy. Empirically, we focus on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Since 2004, the region has lost about 9 percent of its population due to migration to Western Europe. Drawing on data from 430,000 individuals and a panel analysis, we show that CEE migrants systematically hold more liberal values than non-migrants, and that their exit went along with a deterioration of democracy in their home countries. Further analyses show that the mechanism we describe generalizes to various other world regions. Mass emigration may pose a challenge to democratic development in migrant-sending countries around the globe.

How do voters react to an ongoing natural threat? Do voters sanction or reward incumbents even when incumbents cannot be held accountable because an unforeseeable natural disaster is unfolding? We address this question by investigating voters' reactions to the early spread of Covid-19 in the 2020 French municipal elections. Using a novel, fine-grained measure of the circulation of the virus based on excess-mortality data, we find that support for incumbents increased in areas that were particularly hard hit by the virus. Incumbents from both left and right gained votes in areas more strongly affected by Covid-19. We provide suggestive evidence for two mechanisms that can explain our findings: an emotional channel related to feelings of fear and anxiety, and a prospective-voting channel, related to the ability of incumbents to act more swiftly against the diffusion of the virus than challengers.

How does terrorism affect child mortality? We use geo-coded data on terrorism and spatially disaggregated data on child mortality to study the relationship between both variables for 52 African countries between 2000 and 2017 at the 0.5x0.5 degree grid-cell level. Our estimates suggest that even moderate increases in terrorism are linked to several thousand additional annual deaths of children under the age of five. Instrumental-variable and panel event-study approaches that account for endogeneity point to economic effects that are several times larger. Interrogating our data, we show that the direct effects of terrorism (e.g., in terms of its lethality) tend to be very small. Instead, we theorize that terrorism causes child mortality primarily by triggering adverse behavioral responses by parents, medical workers, and policymakers, and provide suggestive evidence in support of this theory.

Natural disasters are likely to increase in the near future. How does the emergence of such events influence voting behavior? While the literature has focused on the electoral repercussions after disaster has already struck, we investigate whether imminent disaster influences vote choice. We study the effect of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic on electoral choice in a setting that allows for causal identification: the local elections in Germany's southern state Bavaria in March 2020, where, at the time of the elections, only an as-if random sample of localities had recorded cases of Covid-19. We find that initial local outbreaks favored the political party governing at the state level and hurt the far right. These findings are most likely driven by a 'strategic alignment' mechanism, whereby voters choose the party or candidate they believe is best placed to help them through the crisis.

Each year, several thousand migrants from sub-Saharan Africa lose their lives attempting to reach Europe's southern shores. Social scientists and policymakers have puzzled over the question of why so many people are willing to take this extremely high risk of dying. Drawing on panel data from over 10,000 individuals collected over the course of 1 year in The Gambia - a country with one of the highest emigration rates in the world - we show that consulting a local healer for spiritual protection predicts migration outcomes. Furthermore, we find that spiritual practices are strongly associated with a decreased perception of one's own risk of dying on the migration journey. Our findings demonstrate the relevance of ideational factors in explaining risky migration choices, and point to spiritual leaders as important interlocutors for migration policy makers.

Information and networks have long been hypothesized to be crucial elements of the formation of emigration intentions. Returnees are a prime source of information about life as a migrant. In this study, we contribute to an emerging literature on the influence of returnees on the formation of migration decisions using representative geolocated data from 5,000 respondents and more than 47,000 family members and relatives from Senegal and The Gambia, two countries with high emigration rates in the past. We demonstrate that the presence of return migrants in a respondent's vicinity is exogenous conditional on the current number of emigrants. This allows us to circumvent the endogeneity of individual networks and to estimate the effect of returnees on individual emigration intentions. Migration intentions are substantially lower when emigrants who returned from Europe are present in the area. This does not apply to returnees from another African country. Further analyses reveal that migrants who returned from another African country improve the economic situation of families, while non-family returnees from Europe have no lasting economic impact but instead alter people's perceptions of migration. We infer that exposure to returnees depresses emigration plans if migration is risky or temporary and the economic benefits limited.

This paper presents the results of the first-ever representative survey on the demographic and attitudinal legacies of the Armenian genocide. The data, collected in 2018, maps the varied geographical origins of the citizens of contemporary Armenia and traces their links to the genocide. Around half of contemporary Armenians descend from refugees of the genocide, while about a third had family members killed. The data also inform debates on how violence transforms societies. Respondents who lost family members during the genocide show elevated levels of ethnocentrism, and lower levels of prosocial behaviour. However, rather than victimization being associated with militarism and hawkishness, the same individuals tend to be less supportive of military solutions. Even though the genocide took place more than a century ago, its demographic and attitudinal legacies remain clearly visible in contemporary Armenia.

We investigate whether the threat of recruitment by rebel groups spurs domestic and international migration. The existing literature on wartime displacement has largely focused on potential victims of violence. We argue that alongside potential victims, we should expect to see the out-migration of individuals who are attractive to the rebels as potential recruits. To test this hypothesis, we draw on original survey data collected in the context of the MFDC insurgency in southern Senegal. Causal identification stems from instrumenting recruitment threat with the density of the local forest canopy cover. Analyzing data from 3,200 respondents and over 24,000 family members, we show that individuals who fit the recruitment profiles of rebel groups are more likely to leave and be sent away by their families. Our paper contributes micro-evidence for a mechanism linking violent conflict to migration, which so far has received scant attention, and provides a deeper understanding of the composition of refugee flows.

Do individuals reveal their true preferences when asked for their support for an ongoing war? This research note presents the results of a list experiment implemented in the midst of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our experiment allows us to estimate the extent of preference falsification with regard to support for the war by comparing the experimental results with a direct question. Our data comes from an online sample of 3,000 Russians. Results show high levels of support for the war and significant levels of preference falsification: when asked directly, 71% of respondents support the war, while this share drops to 61% when using the list experiment. Preference falsification is particularly pronounced among individuals using TV as a main source of news. Our results imply that war leaders can pursue peace without fearing too much of a popular backlash, but also show that high levels of support for war can be sustained even once the brutality of the war has become clear.

How does poverty influence political participation? This question has interested political scientists since the early days of the discipline, but providing a definitive answer has proved difficult. This article focuses on one central aspect of poverty---the experience of acute financial hardship, lasting a few days at a time. Drawing on classic models of political engagement and novel theoretical insights, I argue that by inducing stress, social isolation, and feelings of alienation, acute financial hardship has immediate negative effects on political participation. Inference relies on a natural experiment afforded by the sequence of bank working days that causes short-term financial difficulties for the poor. Using data from 3 million individuals, personal interviews, and 1,100 elections in Germany, I demonstrate that acute financial hardship reduces both turnout intentions and actual turnout. The results imply that the financial status of the poor on election day can have important consequences for their political representation.

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-leaning individuals more towards the center.

While a growing literature studies the effects of climate change on international migration, still only relatively little is known about the individual mechanisms linking migration decisions to climate change. We argue that climate change literacy (i.e., knowledge about climate change) is a major determinant of why some individuals consider migrating to other countries in response to climate change effects. In particular, climate change literacy helps individuals translate their perceptions of temperature changes into an understanding of these changes’ irreversible long-term consequences. We test this hypothesis using highly accurate geo-coded data for 37,000 individuals across 30 African countries. We show that climate change indeed leads to stronger migration intentions among climate literates only. Furthermore, we show that climate change only increases migration intentions among climate literates when it is approximated by long-run increases in local temperatures, but not when operationalized as changing heat wave or precipitation patterns. Further analyses show that climate literates are more likely to live in urban areas, have a higher news consumption, are highly educated, and have demanding occupations. Consequently, climate change may further deprive affected countries of valuable talent.

Recent migration from Muslim-majority countries has sparked discussions across Europe about the supposed threat posed by new immigrants. Young men make up the largest share of newly arrived immigrants and this demographic is perceived to be particularly threatening. In this article, we compare pro-sociality and trust towards immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, focusing on gender differences in treatment. We study these questions using behavioral games that measure strategic (trusting) and non-strategic (pro-social) behavior. Our data comes from measures embedded in a large survey of residents of East Germany, where anti-immigrant sentiments are high. We find that natives are similarly pro-social toward immigrant10men and women in non-strategic situations, but are significantly less likely to trust immigrant men in strategic encounters. These findings provide evidence that immigrants’ gender can be an important factor conditioning natives’ behavior, but also caution that (gendered) ethnic discrimination may be situationally dependent. Future research should further examine the exact mechanisms underlying this variation in discriminatory behavior.

Can the diffusion of broadband internet help explain 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 notion holds up to rigorous empirical testing. Building on survey data from Italy and Germany, we find a positive correlation at the individual level between use of the internet as the main source of political information and voting for populist parties, but not for other mainstream parties. We then demonstrate that this relationship is causal with an instrumental variable strategy, instrumenting internet use with broadband coverage at the municipality level. Our findings suggest that part of the rise of populism can be attributed to the effect of online tools and communication strategies made possible by the proliferation of broadband access.

What undermines cooperation in ethnically diverse communities? Scholars have focused on factors that explain the lack of inter-ethnic cooperation, such as prejudice or the difficulty to communicate and sanction across group boundaries. We direct attention to the fact that diverse communities are also often poor, and ask whether poverty, rather than diversity, reduces cooperation. We developed a strategic cooperation game where we vary the income and racial identity of the interaction partner. We find that beliefs about how poor people behave have clear detrimental effects on cooperation: cooperation is lower when people are paired with low-income partners, and the effect is particularly strong when low-income people interact among themselves. We observe additional discrimination along racial lines when the interaction partner is poor. These findings imply that poverty and rising inequality may be a serious threat to social cohesion, especially under conditions of high socio-economic segregation.

Do ethnic riots affect prosocial 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 in Kyrgyzstan, which saw Kyrgyz from outside the city kill over 400 Uzbeks. We implement a representative survey, which includes unobtrusive experimental measures of prosocial behavior. Our causal identification strategy exploits variation in the distance of neighborhoods to armored military vehicles, which were instrumental in orchestrating the riot. We find that victimized neighborhoods show substantially lower levels of prosocial behavior. Importantly, we demonstrate that the reduction is similarly stark both within and across groups. Using qualitative interviews, we parse out two mechanisms that help explain the surprising reduction in ingroup prosociality: Victimized Uzbeks felt abandoned by their coethnics, and variation in victimization created a feeling of suspicion.

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, or whether lower levels of trust in diverse communities simply reflect a higher concentration of less trusting groups, such as poor people, minorities, or immigrants. Drawing upon a nationally representative sample of the German population (GSOEP), we make two contributions to this debate. First, we examine how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level–specifically the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhood–is linked to social trust focusing on the compositional effect of poverty. Second, in contrast to the majority of current research on ethnic diversity, we use a behavioral measure of trust in combination with fine-grained (zip-code level) contextual measures of ethnic composition and poverty. Furthermore, we are also able to compare the behavioral measure to a standard attitudinal trust question. We find that household poverty partially accounts for lower levels of trust, and that after controlling for income, German and non-German respondents are equally trusting. However, being surrounded by neighbors with immigrant background is also associated with lower levels of social trust.

Why do tax havens, whose attractiveness for foreign capital depends on financial secrecy, agree to automatically report account data to foreign governments? From a contractualist perspective, their cooperation should be motivated by the expectation of joint gains. Prior to agreeing, however, tax havens had expected outflows of foreign capital and reductions in economic activity as likely outcomes. We show that the U.S. imposed automatic information exchange on these countries without itself participating. The result is a strongly redistributive regime that worsens the economic situation of tax havens. By means of a difference-in-differences analysis, we ascertain a substantial and statistically significant negative effect of a U.S. sanctions threat on the value of assets held by foreigners in tax havens relative to non-havens. The effect becomes stronger when the U.S. is included in the non-haven group. The analysis confirms the U.S.’s ability to redistribute financial wealth internationally through organized hypocrisy.

Competition between groups is widely considered to foster cooperation within groups. Evidence from lab experiments hints at the existence of a proximate mechanism by which humans increase their level of support for their ingroup when faced with an external threat. Further work suggests that ingroup support should go along with aggressive behaviour towards the outgroup, although these theories are at odds with others that see high investments in outgroup relations as important means of stabilising inter-group relations. Surprisingly few of these arguments have been tested in the field, however, and existing studies are also limited by the lack of a direct measure of threat perception and aggressive behaviour. This study presents lab-in-the-field results from a rural context where exposure to an ethnic outgroup varies between villages. This context makes it possible to capture levels of threat perception, aggressive behaviour and cooperation without having to induce intergroup competition artificially in the lab. All concepts are measured behaviourally. Ingroup and outgroup cooperation was measured with a standard public goods game, and a novel experimental protocol was developed that measures both perceived threat and aggressive behaviour: the threat game. The results show that levels of perceived threat, ingroup cooperation and aggressive behaviour are higher in regions more strongly exposed to ethnic outsiders. However, exposed regions also show high levels of outgroup cooperation and a concomitant lack of elevated ingroup bias. This pattern is explained by theorising that communities show parochial altruism when faced with an ethnic outgroup, but balance aggressive behaviour with cooperative offers to diffuse tensions and to keep open channels of mutually beneficial exchange.

Ethnic diversity has been linked to important social outcomes such as economic underperformance and civil war, yet its study is still hampered by conceptual difficulties and imprecise measurement. In this paper, a modified understanding of ethnic diversity is developed. Ethnic diversity is disaggregated into two components—first- and second-order ethnic diversity—which have opposing consequences for collective outcomes. While first-order ethnic diversity—the diversity of a local community—is theorized to undermine cooperation, second-order ethnic diversity—the ethnic diversity of the hinterland of a community—is theorized to induce ethnic competition, thereby reinforcing cooperation. Relating data from over 100,000 individuals interviewed at 2,942 locations in 33 African countries to novel subnational indicators of first- and second-order ethno-linguistic diversity, the theory is tested and its basic tenets confirmed. In a next step, I show that it is indeed ethnic competition that accounts for the positive association between second-order diversity and increased cooperation: second-order ethnic diversity is a much better predictor of cooperation in regions where contemporary or historical factors have exacerbated interethnic tensions. The paper sheds new light on the debate on the consequences of ethnic diversity for cooperation and contributes to our understanding of the origins of the global ‘geography of social capital’.

Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluate the theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the cost-effective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others’ valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose recognition by others would lead them to enhance their evaluations of the individual, and (iii) mobilizing the individual to take advantage of the resulting enhanced social landscape. To modulate how much to invest in actions that might lead to enhanced evaluations by others, the pride system must forecast magnitude of the evaluations the action would evoke in the audience and calibrate its activation proportionally. We tested this prediction in 16 countries across 4 continents (n = 2,085), for 25 acts and traits. As predicted, the pride intensity for a given act or trait closely tracks the valuations of audiences, local (mean r = +0.82) and foreign (mean r = +0.75). This relationship is specific to pride and does not generalize to other positive emotions that coactivate with pride but lack its audience-recalibrating function.

This paper provides new insights into the link between the experience of vio- lent conflict and local collective action. I use the temporal and geographical information from four rounds of survey data from Nigeria to relate measures of cooperation to past and future incidences of communal conflict. I show that local collective action, measured in terms of community meeting attendance and volunteering, is highest before the outbreak of violence - higher than both post-conflict levels and the generally lower levels ofcooperation in regions not affected by violence. I develop a 'mobilisation mechanism' to explain these findings, arguing that, rather than being an indicator of social capital, collective action ahead of communal violence is inherently ambiguous, and driven by a form of situationally adaptive (and potentially aggressive) 'solidarity with an edge.' I further show that the positive link between previous exposure to civil-war type violence and cooperation holds for Nigeria, too, but that it holds for rural areas only.

In West and Northern Africa, mobile phone coverage has been expanding in parallel to increased attempts by Africans to migrate overland to Europe. This paper explores possible links between the two phenomena, looking specifically into the role of mobile phones in trans-Saharan migration. It provides a first detailed description of the telecommunication processes underlying contemporary trans-Saharan migration. An analytical framework is presented that helps to explain how mobile phones facilitate migration by interacting with the social and spatial factors shaping migrants’ mobility. By drawing on this framework and fieldwork conducted among Congolese migrants in Morocco, it is shown that the expansion of the communication infrastructure is, on the one hand, only one of several factors that have turned the region into a more “transitable” space. On the other hand, the use of mobile phones is demonstrated to be central to the migration process: migrants draw on the unprecedented accessibility of contacts equipped with mobile phones to tie together novel, geographically expansive networks. Phones are also shown to be used by migrants’ ‘helpers’ for the purpose of internal coordination.