Nelly Buntfuß

TU Chemnitz

Increased hostility between supporters of different parties is often attributed to a rising importance of political identities, but it may be more deeply rooted in social structures.

This phenomenon — referred to as social sorting — is increasingly being discussed as a driver of political polarization.  This study seeks to expand our understanding of

the extent to which negative affect is actually political and to which extent this political hostility has a socio-structural underpinning.  In order to discriminate between the relative effects of different political and, in reality, often correlated social characteristics, I conducted a factorial survey experiment randomizing partisanship, issue positions, social class, gender, and, region in Germany.

By showing respondents more or less “sorted” profiles, this study examines whether profiles with fewer cross-cutting attributes provoke greater negative affect and, in turn, create social distance. The findings will deepen our understanding of how political and social identities interact to shape affective polarization.

Sebastian Wenz

GESIS — Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften

My contribution is twofold: First, I suggest and defend a general definition of failure based on the estimand concept (Lundberg et al., 2021). Secondly, I discuss three ways of how survey experiments on ethnic or racial discrimination potentially—and, in fact, more or less often—fail. For all three I discuss possible solutions.

Based on Lundberg et al. (2021), I call any empirical study a failure or failed, whenever either the empirical estimand or the estimation strategy or both are inadequate to learn about the theoretical estimand.

I discuss three ways of how survey experiments on ethnic or racial discrimination potentially fail: First, experimental studies on ethnic discrimination that use names run into the problem of confounding ethnic discrimination with social class discrimination. I illustrate the problem using DAGs. I discuss different solutions but focus on the selection of names that hold the social class signal constant.

Secondly, the common practice of analyzing simple random samples is unlikely to provide unbiased estimates of discrimination as it takes place in segregated markets (Heckman, 1998), be it labor markets, education systems, or housing markets. As a solution, researchers may sample/analyze only those units that are in the situation in question or weight units accordingly.

Thirdly, studies that assess discrimination at only one point along the performance distribution or using an otherwise non-representative sample of candidates are severely limited: without making further assumptions, they neither allow inference about the average level or direction of individual discrimination nor can they say anything about group discrimination.

Fabian Kalleitner¹; Bernhard Kittel²

¹ LMU Munich; ² University of Vienna

Fiscal consolidation continues to be a key topic in political discourse, as governments navigate the tension between public support for welfare benefits and calls for a smaller state. This study examines how individuals react to messages about fiscal deficits, drawing on data from a novel pre-registered factorial survey experiment conducted in Austria in 2025. Specifically, we analyze under what conditions individuals prefer revenue-expanding reforms over welfare retrenchment. To explain these preferences, we focus on two key political instruments used to contextualize welfare reforms during periods of fiscal pressure: (1) the stated source of the budget deficit (i.e., which policy area is blamed) and (2) the (in)transparency of its consequences (i.e., how clearly tax hikes or benefit cuts are communicated). Our results show that support for reforms is sensitive to cues about the deficit’s origin. While general statements about reform size have little effect, transparent communication of consequences reduces support. Overall, support for fiscal reform depends not only on the type of measure but also on its distributive effects, perceived origins, and the clarity with which outcomes are presented. These findings underscore the importance of elite cues and media framing, showing that how a reform is presented can be as decisive as its content in shaping public opinion.

Knut Petzold

Hochschule Zittau/Görlitz

Vignette experiments are increasingly used to investigate ethnic, religious or gender-based discrimination. Since hypothetical descriptions of people are presented, the method is considered suitable for collecting sensitive information in an ethically justifiable and unobtrusive manner. Response behaviour reflecting disciminatory intentions can be causally attributed to the characteristics presented. However, the application is based on the assumption that the results obtained through vignette experiments allow conclusions to be drawn about actual discriminatory behavior in real situations, which has rarely been tested so far. We challenge this assumption as the results of a vignette experiment are being validated using a respective field experiment. By the example of international university graduates in the German labor market, who apply for job offers at an online-platform, a correspondence test among employers in different industries and labor market segments provides the behavioral benchmark data. We investigate to what extent discrimination effects in employers’ responses observed in the field experiment can be replicated in a vignette experiment among the same employers, while ensuring the greatest possible comparability across both experimental conditions. The results show that the effects can only be replicated inconsistently. We discuss this in the context of the current state of research and in the light of general theoretical considerations in order to derive methodological implications for future applications of vignette experiments when measuring ethnic discrimination.