In September 2010 the anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), crossed the electoral threshold to the Swedish parliament (Riksdagen) for the first time with 5.7 percent of the total votes. The aim of this article is to analyze the effect of the media exposure on fluctuations in opinion...

Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents...

This paper examines how violence in the Second Intifada influences Palestinian public opinion. Using micro data from a series of opinion polls linked to data on fatalities, we find that Israeli violence against Palestinians leads them to support more radical factions and more radical attitudes...

How did post-communist transformations affect people's perceptions of their economic and political systems? We model a pseudo-panel with 89 country-year clusters, based on 13 countries observed between 1991 and 2004, to identify the macro and institutional drivers of the public opinion. Our main...

It is widely believed that the current recession has soured public attitudes towards immigration. But most existing studies are cross sectional and can shed little light on the economy-wide forces that shift public opinion on immigration. In this paper I use the six rounds of the European Social...

We posit that historical resource scarcities played a role in the emergence of gender norms inimical to women that persist to this day. This thesis is supported by our finding that nations’ historical resource endowments, as measured by the historical availability of arable land, are...

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...