Our world is marked by vast inequalities in income and wealth, many of which have deep historical roots. In my research, I ask how both historical and contemporary inequalities—within and between countries—shape demand for domestic and international redistribution. I draw on comparative survey data and conduct experiments to understand what leads people to support or oppose policies that can redress existing inequalities. The findings highlight the importance of horizontal inequalities, between social groups and countries, and policy beliefs, for example about the economic impacts of taxation, for public opinion. They provide a better understanding of when and why citizens are likely to exert pressure on governments, be it through voting or other types of political participation, to enact redistributive policies.
Undeserving Heirs: How the Origins of Wealth Shape Attitudes Towards Redistribution (with Nora Waitkus)
European Societies, forthcoming
Inherited wealth has often been accumulated under circumstances seen as undeserving by present-day standards. However, there is surprisingly little knowledge about the political consequences of wealth's history. We argue that illegitimate accumulation nurtures opposition and calls for redistribution, even after multiple generations. To test our theory, we conduct a survey in Germany, where many wealthy business owners inherited companies that made large fortunes during one of the darkest episodes of human history, the Nazi regime of 1933-1945. We demonstrate with a vignette experiment that individuals perceive heirs of businesses that cooperated with the Nazi regime as less deserving than other similar heirs, and are more likely to support the targeted redistribution of such inherited business wealth. Therefore, undeservingness can be inherited and passed on from one generation to another. These results align with general views and attitudes about the German economy. Our findings add to studies on the historical origins of public opinion as well as deservingness by showing how illegitimate wealth accumulation affects political attitudes across generations.
International Inequality and Demand for Redistribution in the Global South
Political Science Research and Methods, 12(2), 407-415, 2024
Despite considerable progress, inequality between countries remains at staggering levels. However, we know surprisingly little about demand for international redistribution in the Global South. This is unfortunate as it hinders our understanding of the pressures governments experience to cooperate internationally. Therefore, this paper studies perceptions of international inequality and attitudes towards international aid, an important instrument for redistribution, in Kenya, a major recipient of aid. It features an SMS-based survey experiment, in which respondents are treated with information about international income differences. It is found that most respondents underestimate these differences and that providing accurate information lowers inequality acceptance. However, this does not translate into demand for aid. The findings question often-made assumptions about the popularity of aid and call for further investigation of other internationally redistributive policies.
Mind the Income Gaps? Experimental Evidence of Information's Lasting Effect on Redistributive Preferences
Social Justice Research, 33(2), 2020
Individuals reject economic inequality if they believe it to result from unequal opportunities. This paper argues income gaps between groups determined at birth, based on sex, race, or family background, can serve people as an indication of unequal opportunities. Findings from a survey experiment show Americans underestimate these gaps. When confronted with accurate information, participants correct their perceptions and adjust redistributive preferences. A follow-up survey finds these effects to last for over one year. In sum, this paper contributes to political economy scholarship that links individual preferences to objective characteristics of the income distribution. Focusing on income gaps offers new ways to explore the political consequences of structural economic change.
Featured in The Washington Post: The Monkey Cage [PDF]
Taxing Your Cake and Growing It Too: Public Beliefs on the Dual Benefits of Progressive Taxation (with Bruno Castanho Silva and Hanna Lierse) [revise&resubmit]
Political and economic elites often warn that taxes on the rich impair economic growth. Although such warnings have a long tradition in elite discourse and election campaigns, what the public believes about the effects of progressive taxation remains surprisingly understudied. This omission limits our understanding of a basic democratic mechanism, the congruence of elite and mass opinion. To close this gap, we employ a conjoint experiment during the last German national election on a representative quota sample. Participants compare policy packages that entail changes in income, inheritance, and corporate taxes and evaluate their impact on equality and growth. We find no evidence that the public believes in a trade-off between equality and growth. Instead participants believe that both go hand in hand, particularly for income and wealth taxation. Furthermore, such beliefs do not vary by ideology or economic status. Our findings may help to shape a more consensual approach to progressive taxation that emphasizes positive synergies between economic growth and greater equality.
Who wants What, and Why? Understanding Support and Opposition to UBI (with Hanna Schwander) [revise&resubmit]
Universal Basic Income (UBI) constitutes a novel and radical policy proposal that promises to address a number of economic challenges in advanced democracies. Previous studies have shown that support for UBI is generally high but political debates remain controversial and the political viability of UBI limited. We move beyond the existing literature to study these controversies from the perspective of political polarization. In addition to studying who the proponents and opponents of UBI are, we explore how both sides differ in what UBI they want and why. We conduct a survey in the context of an active local UBI campaign and use an extended conjoint design to study preference heterogeneity and an open-ended survey question to capture justifications without imposing constraints. Our findings show how disagreements about UBI are rooted in divergent attitudes and arguments but also point towards common ground that could increase the political viability of UBI.
We did What? Historical Information and Political Backlash among Descendants of Perpetrators [under review]
Global inequality and international migration are deeply rooted in the history of European colonialism. However, the impact of this legacy on contemporary public opinion about international politics remains underexplored. Drawing on studies of intergroup hostility, I argue that exposing descendants of perpetrator groups to information about past transgressions, such as violent and exploitative colonization, can induce defensiveness and increase outgroup bias. This argument is supported by attitudinal and behavioral evidence from a representative survey experiment (n=1,680) in Germany—a country only beginning to grapple with its colonial past. The findings demonstrate that raising awareness of historical intergroup hostilities can, under certain circumstances, produce a backlash rather than facilitate reconciliation.
Colonialism has left a lasting imprint on what is widely referred to as the Global South. With a focus on Africa, my work unpacks the legacies of governmental and non-governmental actors, in particular in relation to social policy and inequality. To this end I combine archival research with geospatial techniques to tap new data sources and study legacies at a highly granular level. My research highlights the early impact and persistence of social spending by colonial governments. It also demonstrates how non-governmental actors--in particular Christian missions--and their relation to colonial governments continues to shape contemporary social outcomes and inequalities, and has important downstream consequences, such as for support for democracy. My work contributes to our understanding of deeply rooted policy and governance challenges, and might inform ways of overcoming them.
Colonial Legacies of Social Policy (with Joan Ricart-Huguet)
A. Barrientos, M. Carnes, H. Kwon, H. Obinger, L. Patel, and C. Schmitt (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Policies in the Developing World, Oxford University Press, forthcoming
European colonial governments in the Global South, though primarily extractive, pursued some legislation and investments in social policy, even if typically for self-serving purposes. This chapter examines these historical policies because they constitute the foundation of the post-independence period and, in some cases, even present-day social policies in much of the Global South. We revisit the main areas of colonial social policy – education, healthcare, and income support – and identify five general patterns that continue to have repercussions for policymaking today: the top-down accountability of governing institutions; the limited coverage of social policy programmes; the geographically uneven supply of social services; the highly segregated supply of social services; and the strong involvement of transnational entities and actors in social policymaking. Furthermore, we explore how greater state capacity, democratization, and broad-based leadership have allowed some former colonies to redesign and extend pre-independence social policy while others are marked by greater persistence.
Between God and Nation: The Colonial Origins of Democracy Support in British Africa (with Dean Dulay)
Studies in Comparative International Development, online first
Popular support is important to the emergence and survival of democracy. In this paper we study how church-state relations in former British Africa shaped long-run support for democracy. We argue that shared national identity was the basis for incentive alignment, facilitating cooperation over educational policy between church and state and leading to long-lasting support for democracy. Employing geospatial analyses of historical missions data and contemporary social survey data from 19 former British African colonies, we find that areas with missions originating from Britain exhibit better educational outcomes and greater support for democracy than areas that had non-British missions. Furthermore, areas with British Protestant missions show greater support for democracy than British Catholic missions, suggesting that Protestantism supplements the benefits of shared nationhood between mission and state. Our findings add nuance to scholarship on the colonial origins of democracy by highlighting the interdependent legacies of church and state.
License to Educate: The Role of National Networks in Colonial Empires (with Carina Schmitt)
World Development, 169, 2023
Colonial Africa was shaped by a variety of European actors. Of foremost importance in the educational sector were both colonial governments and Christian mission societies. While their activities and long-term implications are often analyzed in isolation, few systematic studies investigate relationships between them. However, it is well-known that underfunded colonial governments supported mission societies, who used schools to attract new converts, as low-cost educational providers. In this paper, we argue that mission societies that shared national ties with colonial governments benefited from increased support and engaged in more extensive educational activities. Using new historical data on Protestant mission societies from the interwar period in Africa, we demonstrate that national alignment between mission societies and colonizer’s identity in British Africa was associated with more primary schools and higher enrolment. We discuss and explore potential channels underlying this dynamic, including financial support for missionary activities as well as the granting of access to more favourable locations. Our findings show that national networks are an important but understudied aspect of colonial empires. Furthermore, analyzing the early expansion of education provides insights on the causal links often assumed by studies focused exclusively on long-term effects.
Women on a Mission: Protestant Legacies of Gender Equality in Africa? (with Felix Meier zu Selhausen) [accepted, European Review of Economic History]
African Economic History Network Working Paper No. 72, 2023
Christian missions, especially Protestants missions, have been shown to advance long-run education outcomes and gender equality in Africa. However, the mechanisms behind this benign legacy and the contribution of missionary women, who constituted more than half of all Western mission staff, are not well-understood. We compile a new extensive data set on the locations of missions in colonial Africa, including the gender composition of their staff. In combination with contemporary survey data on one million respondents in 29 African countries, we provide evidence of missions' equalizing effects with regards to education and a wide range of female agency outcomes. We document that Protestant missions left no more benign legacy than Catholics, questioning the Protestant exceptionalism highlighted by prior studies. We also document a strong association between missionary women and girls' school enrollment in colonial times but find no evidence of any lasting gendered effects. Post-independence expansion of public education and the secularization of school curricula may have offset persistence of Africa's earliest centers of female education.
Politics in Western democracies has become increasingly populist and polarized. My research investigates the causes of these developments and seeks to understand how some of its undesired consequences might be addressed.
Forgive or Forget? How Contentious Memory Policy Proposals Affect Public Opinion and Voting (with Francesco Colombo)
Memory policies that seek to de-commemorate majority group figures often spark controversy. Existing research presents conflicting evidence on the political consequences, with some attesting to a backlash effect and others to progressive shifts in public opinion. We propose that such differences can arise from distinct effects at different stages of the policy cycle. Focusing on the pre-adoption stage, we argue that de-commemoration proposals evoke collective guilt over historical injustices, mobilizing support for reparative policies, particularly among left-leaning individuals. To test this, we study a controversial street-renaming proposal in Berlin targeting anti-Semitic figures. Combining a difference-in-difference analysis of fine-grained election data with a large stratified survey experiment, we find that the proposal reduced support for right-wing parties and bolstered progressive voting, with no evidence of backlash. Emotional mechanisms, particularly heightened historical guilt, explain the observed shifts among ideologically predisposed groups. By highlighting the pre-adoption effects of memory policies, this study contributes to the growing literature on symbolic politics, challenging assumptions about the inevitability of backlash and uncovering the role of emotions in shaping public responses to inclusionary memory.
Do Democratic Parties Lose from Cooperating with Right-Wing Extremists? (with Anselm Hager) [under review]
The rise of extremist far-right parties has put democratic parties in a dilemma: When centrist parties do not cooperate with the far-right, they can often only partner with the political left, making it difficult to pass conservative legislation. However, when cooperating with the far-right, center-right parties not only legitimize extremist platforms, but they may also lose votes to the far-right, which may be seen as the true advocate of conservative politics. But does cooperation with the far-right really hurt centrist parties? This study makes use of a natural experiment that took place in Germany. On January 29, 2025, the center-right CDU, for the first time, passed a motion with the help of the far-right Alternative for Germany. Using survey data (N = 4,075) from right before and after this watershed moment, we assess whether cooperation with the far-right hurts or helps centrist parties. Applying a well-powered regression discontinuity design, we find citizens become more likely to vote for the CDU after it decided to cooperate with the far-right. At the same time, the far-right AfD failed to gain any support. We argue that the gain in support for the centrist CDU is due to increased authenticity. By not strategically withholding legislation that the far-right might support, centrist parties communicate to voters that they push for their agendas regardless of who supports their positions.