Search

Truth commissions (TCs) are increasingly lauded by policymakers as a key part of the process of addressing systematic abuses and violence in the past, whether civil war, apartheid, colonialism, or abuse against minorities (Dancy and Thoms 2021; Skaar 2018). Yet, systematic evidence on the effects of implementing truth seeking mechanisms remains limited (Hirsch, MacKenzie, and Sesay 2012). Despite a growing literature that examines determinants of support for different transitional justice measures, our knowledge about consequences of transitional justice at the individual level remains limited. To address this gap and to assess some of the common assumptions about the effects of TCs, we investigate whether the public release of the Norwegian TRC’s report on historical injustices in the government’s treatment of the Sámi and other national minorities in Norway had any immediate causal effects on the views of importance of understanding the past, prejudice, and support for government policies for minority rights.

With accelerating climate change, political conflicts over the appropriate policy responses have intensified. Studies of public opinion have identified a range of individual level variables that are correlated with views on climate change (see e.g. Hornsey et al. 2016 for a meta analysis). In rich countries, many studies find a gender gap in such views, where men express less concern than women (see e.g. Bush and Clayton 2022). This seems to hold in Norway too (Krange et al. 2018). Our project attempts to address several shortcomings in the literature on the gender gap in environmental attitudes. First, while there is a rich literature on concerns and awareness of climate change (see e.g. Egan and Mullin 2017, Fairbrother 2022), we know little about support for specific policies and whether the gender gap translates from concerns to policy preferences. Second, and related to the first point, we do not know what causes the gender gap, which is presumably key for whether there is a gender gap also in policy preferences. For instance, if it represents fundamental differences in concern and risk assessments (as argued by Kahan et al. 2007), it will likely spillover from concern to all types of preferences, while if it represents self-interest, such as being driven by more men working in extractive industries, it will presumably vary across policies and across men. Finally, we do not know much about how voters trade off different aspects of climate change policies, such as the use of market mechanisms, distributional concerns, costs burdens, and impacts on other parts of the environment (e.g. wind farms harming wildlife) when forming their climate change policy preferences. This is key to understand which policies are more or less likely to be implemented.

Ideological Biases in Research Evaluations? The Case of Research on Majority-Minority Relations

We conduct a vignette survey experiment to detect bias against ethnic minority candidates among Norwegian politicians. In addition, we conduct a list experiment among Norwegian voters to examine bias against voting for a party list with ethnic minority candidates.

We study how voters respond to randomized policy platforms that represent two potential directions that Social Democratic Parties might move.

To attract voters, politicians might appeal to their interests and attitudes through policies. They may also appeal to their identities by supplying candidates that belong to their social group or by providing messages that symbolically appeal to the group. While there is an advanced literature on the role of policy appeals, much less is known about the effects of social and particularly symbolic appeals. Moreover, since politicians can jointly make several appeals, it is important to examine how voters weigh appeals against each other. In this project we conduct a conjoint experiment in Norway where we estimate the effects of all three types of appeals, with a specific emphasis on symbolic appeals to social class.