Browsing by Author "Christensen, Love"

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Echoes of Violent Conflict: The Effect of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict on Hate Crimes in the U.S.
(University of Gothenburg, 2021-05) Christensen, Love; Enlund, Jakob; Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg
Do social identity ties facilitate the spread of violent conflict? We assess whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict causes hate crime towards Jews and Muslims in the U.S using daily data between 2000-2016. We measure the timing, intensity and instigator in the conflict using the number of conflict fatalities and U.S. mass media coverage of the conflict. Analyses using both conflict measures find that conflict events trigger hate crimes in the following days following a retaliatory pattern: Anti-Jewish hate crimes increase a.er Israeli attacks and anti-Islamic hate crimes increase a.er Palestinian attacks. There is little evidence that the ethno-religious group not associated with the attacker is subjected to hate crimes. Moreover, the lack of an effect of non-violent conflict reporting suggests that hate crimes are not triggered by the salience of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in itself. Our findings suggest that victimization transcends the locality of the conflict, implying that violent conflict may be more costly than existing research suggests.
The Effect pf Economic Inequality on Demand for Redistribtion
(2013-10-28) Christensen, Love; Hagman, Pontus; University of Gothenburg/Department of Economics; Göteborgs universitet/Institutionen för nationalekonomi med statistik
In this paper we have examined the relationship between economic inequality and demand for redistribution for 23 OECD countries and 17 European countries respectively. We depart from two different theories with contradictory predictions of the relationship between demand for redistribution and economic inequality: the median voter theorem predicting a positive correlation (Meltzer and Richard 1986), and the social distance model (MacRae 2006) predicting a negative correlation. We test the theories using two different measures of demand for redistribution: aggregate vote share of right wing parties and individual attitudes towards increased government redistribution. We also briefly examine the Prospect of Upwards Mobility hypothesis, which claims that it is not economic inequality as such but social mobility that determines demand for redistribution. We used election data from between 1975 and 2009, and survey data from 2002-2010. This enabled us to exploit the cross-sectional and time variation in economic inequality, to study the effect on demand for redistribution. The main contribution of this paper lies in the usage of new data, inequality data from 2005 and 2010, together with more robust econometric estimation techniques, e.g. fixed effects models. The results of the econometric estimation for both measures of demand for redistribution do not support any of the theories strongly, and are principally in line with most of the literature that does not find a statistically significant association between economic inequality and demand for redistribution. However, we do identify several important methodological caveats, e.g. limited variation in explanatory variables and reverse causality, and therefore stress that the empirical findings should be taken with a grain of salt.
Uncertainty and Persuasion. Essays on Behavioral Political Economy
(2022-01-13) Christensen, Love
When voters form their political opinions and decide whom to vote for, they are confronted with at least two types of uncertainty. First, voters cannot be sure what reforms a political party will pursue once in office. Second, the outcomes of political reforms are never perfectly known. How can political actors exploit this uncertainty to persuade voters and to shape public opinion? And how can voters mitigate this uncertainty by making inferences about the likely outcomes of political reforms and the credibility of parties' promises? Across three papers, I show that parties can shape public opinion by influencing voter beliefs about the outcomes of political reforms. However, voters discount both outcome predictions that clash strongly with their prior beliefs and policy changes which they perceive to be motivated by vote-maximizing considerations in contrast to sincere policy considerations. This dissertation shows that changing voter beliefs is an important way to shape public opinion, but that voters' pre-existing beliefs also constrain what politicians can claim without losing their credibility.