State Action and Moral Attitudes Toward Sexual Consent (with Eli Baltzersen and Øyvind Skorge)
In recent years, several countries have in moved from a coercion-based to a consent-based legal definition of rape. Building on expressive law theory, we discuss how a move to consent-based rape legislation may shift moral attitudes toward sexual consent. In this Registered Report, we test this prediction experimentally in Norway, where a proposal was recently made to include consent in the current coercion-based legal framework. Providing information treatments about current and proposed legislation to a representative sample of Norwegian citizens and large additional samples of civil servants and elected representatives, allows us to test the expressive power of the proposed law while holding information about current legislation constant. Contrary to our pre-registered hypothesis, we find a small backlash effect among citizens who are informed about the proposed legal reform. In our exploratory sub-group analysis, we find a positive effect of our information treatment only in the sample of elected politicians.
Political Determinants of the News Market: Novel Data and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from India (with Julia Cagé and Guilhem Cassan)
Information conveyed through news media influences political behavior. But to what extent are media markets themselves shaped by political determinants? We build a novel panel dataset of newspaper markets in India from 2002 to 2017 to measure the impact of changes in electoral importance on how news markets develop over time. We exploit the announcement of an exogenous change in the boundaries of electoral constituencies to causally identify the relationship between the (future) electoral importance of news markets and the change in the number and circulation of newspapers. Using both an event-study and a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we show that markets that became more electorally important experienced a significant rise in both circulation and the number of titles per capita. Both supply and demand seem to drive the increase, but we estimate that the former explains almost all the variation in the short run and around 50% in the long run. Finally, we document how effects vary with prior levels of political competition and newspapers’ characteristics, and discuss implications for voting behavior and democratic accountability.
Beyond Hate Speech: Online Rumors and Out-Group Resentment in Divided Societies (with Mathilde Bålsrud Mjelva, Sebastian Schutte, Helga Malmin Binningsbø)
The political consequences of hate speech on social media are the subject of intense research. Studies from Europe and North America have found that online exposure to hate speech affects both attitudes and offline behavior. Moving beyond hate speech, we show how little it takes for online rumors to stoke inter-group tensions in divided societies. In a pre-registered survey experiment with 3,075 Hindu social media users in India, we navigate ethical challenges with very mild information treatments, post-treatment fact-checks, and debriefs. We find that even subtle online rumors change sentiments toward entire groups and heighten conflict-related emotions, especially when combined with injustice frames. As none of our information treatments classify as hate speech, these problems appear inherent to social media technology and point toward a need for a broader debate on policy responses.
The Politics of Assisted Reproduction: Global Inequality and the Role of the State (with Eli Baltzersen, Catarina Barbieri, Mala Htun, and My Rafstedt)
Involuntary childlessness is a challenge across the world, but there is great global inequality in access to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). In contrast to abortion, ARTs have been significantly less politicized, and state regulation is still evolving. In this paper, we draw on both cross-national data and case studies to demonstrate the uneven access to ARTs both across and within countries, something that constitutes a serious challenge for global reproductive justice. Further, we discuss how ARTs differ from abortion and other morality politics issues in that they only challenge religious doctrine to a limited degree. Finally, we unpack ARTs as a political issue that maps onto numerous ongoing political debates. Overall, our goal is to demonstrate that the politics of ARTs affect not only the lives of individuals needing assistance to achieve parenthood but are also relevant to various contentious political topics, and therefore warrant more attention from political actors and academics alike.
Keeping women out: Incumbency and renomination patterns for female politicians in India (with Tarsha Vasu and Pavithra Suryanarayan)
Whereas village-level quotas in India have brought hundreds of thousands of women to power in local politics, only 4.6% of the Members of Parliament (MPs) and 4.7% of the Members of Legislative Assemblies (MLAs) in India have been women since 1961. Using a complete, new dataset of the more than 550,000 candidates in Indian state assembly and parliamentary elections 1961-2023, including almost 30,000 female candidates, we show that female candidates tend to do as well as male candidates in the elections where they run. Controlling for differences in candidate quality by using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) of close elections between male and female candidates, we also show that parties tend to re-nominate fewer of their female than their male incumbents and runner-ups. The findings indicate that it is party bias and a hostile political environment rather than voters bias that has made the inclusion of women in Indian politics so slow.