Yotam Margalit

Explaining Social Policy Preferences: Evidence from the Great Recession

To what extent do personal circumstances, as compared to ideological dispositions, drive voters’ preferences on welfare policy? Addressing this question is difficult because a persons ideological position can be an outcome of material interest rather than an independent source of preferences. The article deals with this empirical challenge using an original panel study carried out over four years, tracking the labor market experiences and the political attitudes of a national sample of Americans before and after the eruption of the financial crisis. The analysis shows that the personal experience of economic hardship, particularly the loss of a job, had a major effect on increasing support for welfare spending. This effect was appreciably larger among Republicans than among Democrats, a result that was not simply due to a “ceiling effect.” However the large attitudinal shift was short lived, dissipating as individuals’ employment situations improved. The results indicate that the personal experience of an economic shock has a sizable, yet overall transient effect on voters’ social policy preferences.

Costly Jobs: Trade-related Layoffs, Government Compensation, and Voting in U.S. Elections

Does globalizations impact on the labor market affect how people vote? I address this question using a new dataset based on plant-level data that measures the impact of foreign competition on the U.S. workforce over an 8-year period. Analyzing change in the presidents vote share, I find that voters were substantially more sensitive to the loss of local jobs when it resulted from foreign competition, particularly from offshoring, than to job losses caused by other factors. Yet, I also find that between 2000 and 2004, the anti-incumbent effect of trade-related job losses was smaller in areas where the government certified more of the harmed workers to receive special job training and income assistance. The findings have implications for understanding the impact of international economic integration on voting behavior, as well as for assessing the electoral effect of government programs designed to compensate the losers from globalization.

Short-Term Communication Effects or Longstanding Dispositions? The Public’s Response to the Financial Crisis of 2008

Economic interests and party identification are two key, long-standing factors that shape people’s attitudes on government policy. Recent research has increasingly focused on how short-term communication effects (e.g., issue framing, media priming) also influence public opinion. Rather than posit that political attitudes reflect one source of considerations more than another, we argue that the two interact in a significant and theoretically predictable manner. To explore this claim, we examine the American public’s attitudes towards the government’s response to the financial crisis of 2008. We designed three survey experiments conducted on a large national sample, in which we examine the influence of (1) group-serving biases, (2) goal framing, and (3) threshold sensitivity. We find that economic standing and partisanship moderate the impact of communication effects as a function of their content. Our results demonstrate how people’s sensitivity to peripheral presentational features interacts with more fundamental dispositions in shaping attitudes on complex policy issues.

Do concerns about labor market competition shape attitudes toward immigration? New evidence

Are concerns about labor market competition a powerful source of anti-immigrant sentiment? Several prominent studies have examined survey data on voters and concluded that fears about the negative effects of immigration on wages and employment play a major role generating anti-immigrant attitudes. We examine new data from a targeted survey of U.S. employees in 12 different industries. In contrast with previous studies, the findings indicate that fears about labor market competition do not appear to have substantial effects on attitudes toward immigration, and preferences with regard to immigration policy, among this large and diverse set of voters.

Expectation Setting and Retrospective Voting

That citizens engage in retrospective voting is widely established in the literature. But to what extent is retrospection affected by the expectations that leaders set in advance? We develop a theoretical framework of how expectation setting affects voters’ retrospective evaluations of incumbent performance. To test the theory, we conduct a series of between-subjects experiments in which we independently manipulate both expectation setting and the eventual outcome. In domains where politicians have practical authority, or direct influence over outcomes, setting high expectations incurs a cost in public support if the projected outcome is not attained. The same is true in domains where politicians have theoretical authority, or limited influence, but where expectation setting sends a signal about the leader’s judgment. However, in domains where politicians have neither practical nor theoretical authority, setting high expectations is unambiguously beneficial, implying that optimism is valued by voters as a personality disposition.

Policy Design and Domestic Support for International Bailouts

Financial bailouts for ailing Eurozone countries face deep and widespread opposition among voters in donor countries, casting major doubts over the political feasibility of further assistance efforts. What is the nature of the opposition and under what conditions can governments obtain broader political support for funding such large-scale, international transfers? This question is addressed by distinguishing theoretically between ‘fundamental’ and ‘contingent’ attitudes. Whereas the former entail complete rejection or embrace of a policy, the latter depend on the specific features of the policy and could shift if those features are altered. Combining unique data from an original survey in Germany – the largest donor country – together with an experiment that varies salient policy dimensions, the analysis indicates that less than a quarter of the public exhibits fundamental opposition to the bailouts. Testing a set of theories on contingent attitudes, particular sensitivity is found to the burden-sharing and cost dimensions of the bailouts. The results imply that the choice of specific features of a rescue package has important consequences for building domestic support for international assistance efforts.

How Sanctions Affect Public Opinion in Target Countries: Experimental Evidence From Israel

How do economic sanctions affect the political attitudes of individuals in targeted countries? Do they reduce or increase support for policy change? Are targeted, “smart” sanctions more effective in generating public support? Despite the importance of these questions for understanding the effectiveness of sanctions, they have received little systematic attention. We address them drawing on original data from Israel, where the threat of economic sanctions has sparked a contentious policy debate. We first examine the political effects of the European Union’s (EU) 2015 decision to label goods produced in the West Bank, and then expand our analysis by employing a survey experiment that allows us to test the differential impact of sanction type and sender identity. We find that the EU’s decision produced a backlash effect, increasing support for hardline policies and raising hostility toward Europe. Our findings further reveal that individuals are likely to support concessions only in the most extreme and unlikely of circumstances—a comprehensive boycott imposed by a sender perceived as a key strategic ally. These results offer theoretical and policy implications for the study of the effects of economic sanctions.

Replication Data for: The Economic Consequences of Partisanship in a Polarized Era

With growing affective polarization in the United States, partisanship is increasingly an impediment to cooperation in political settings. But does partisanship also affect behavior in nonpolitical settings? We show evidence that it does, demonstrating its effect on economic outcomes across a range of experiments in real-world environments. A field experiment in an online labor market indicates that workers request systematically lower reservation wages when the employer shares their political stance, reflecting a preference to work for co-partisans. We conduct two field experiments with consumers and find a preference for dealing with co-partisans, especially among those with strong partisan attachments. Finally, via a population-based, incentivized survey experiment, we find that the influence of political considerations on economic choices extends also to weaker partisans. Whereas earlier studies show the political consequences of polarization in American politics, our findings suggest that partisanship spills over beyond the political, shaping cooperation in everyday economic