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Machine learning and other computer-driven prediction models are one of the fastest growing trends in computational social science. These methods and approaches were developed in computer science and with different goals and epistemologies than those in social science. The most obvious difference being a focus on prediction versus explanation. Predictive modeling offers great potential for improving research and theory development, but its adoption poses some challenges and creates new problems. For this reason, Hofman et al. published recommendations for more effective integration of predictive modeling into social science. In this communication, I review their recommendations and expand on some additional concerns related to current practices and whether prediction can effectively serve the goals of most social scientists. Overall, I argue they provide a sound set of guidelines and a classification scheme that will serve those of us working in computational social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Novel Coronavirus Pandemic causes heightened risk perceptions, in particular related to health, mortality and economic security. In 'normal' times, these are risks covered by social welfare states via social insurance and protection policies. My research question is what role the welfare state plays in a global emergency - here the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic. I test for an impact of the welfare state on risk perceptions using COVIDiSTRESS data comparing 70 countries in April, 2020. Adjusting for local timing and severity of outbreak, I demonstrate that strength of the welfare state predicts lower risk perceptions. However, this depends on the speed of government intervention: rapid intervention removes the effect of the welfare state. Therefore, I conclude from this study that when governments fail to take swift measures, the welfare state plays a major role in alleviating risk perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The replication crisis in the behavioral and social sciences spawned a credibility revolution, calling for new open science research practices that ensure greater transparency, including preregistrations, open data and code, and open access.Replications of published research are an important element in this revolution as part of the self-correcting process of scientific knowledge production; however, the teaching value of replications is still underutilized thus far.Pedagogical knowledge points to the value of replication as critical to the scientific method of test and retest. Psychology has already begun mass efforts to reproduce previous experiments. Yet, we have very few examples of how analytical and reanalysis replications, after the data come in, contribute to the reproducibility crisis and can be integrated into undergraduate and graduate courses.Replications with quantitative data can be a pedagogical tool for improving student research method skills and introducing them to best research practices via learning-by-doing.This article aims to start filling this gap by offering guidance to instructors in designing and teaching replications for students at various levels and disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences, including a supplementary teaching companion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence suggests that books in the childhood home impact children's educational and occupational attainments. Previous research finds this 'book effect' after conditioning on parental socio-economic status and national context. Human and cultural capital theories offer plausible explanations for this book effect. However, mechanisms underlying the book effect remain empirically illusory. Drawing on previous findings, the authors develop theoretical arguments that human and cultural capital are not the entire story behind the book effect. Designing a formal model of all these processes, the authors test their claims using immigration, language and country-context to adjudicate between mechanisms hypothesized by the theories. Using CILS4EU data in four countries and structural equation modeling to test these theories' models against the data, the authors find the direct effect of books does not differ between native and immigrant adolescents in predicting 9th grade language aptitude scores. Moreover, this effect does not vary much by country. Reading habits and primary language spoken at home explain only part of the effect suggesting the presence of books measures something operating independently and in addition to human and cultural capital. The authors suggest books create opportunities for children whose parents are unlikely to cultivate scholarly values on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We revisit a longstanding hypothesis that the public become more supportive of redistributive policy as income inequality rises. Previous tests of this hypothesis using various forms of general least squares regressions are inconclusive. We suggest improvements and alternatives to these tests. Using the World Inequality Data and International Social Survey Program we analyze 91 surveys in 18 countries. We incorporate three alternative measures of income inequality, including a measure of liberalization as a known cause of increases in income inequality. We also employ two alternative test formats that arguably reflect the data generating model better than a least squares regression. The first is vector-autoregression aiming to account for path dependency of public opinion and income inequality, and the endogeneity between them. Next is qualitative comparative analysis to capture sets of conditions that collectively should have led to inequality having an impact on public opinion. Finally, we run our regression models separately for low and high socio-economic strata. In all tests we find no measurable impact of income inequality on support for redistribution. From a macro-perspective we argue that this suggests ruling out a general effect that exists across space and time, and focusing instead on theory to explain why there should not be a general effect. Some arguments suggest the public are normatively opposed to what sounds like 'handouts'. We therefore discuss model specification via theory, but also Type II errors, statistical power and the limitations of our conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the first International Social Survey Program's Role of Government module, many scholars assumed the "ideal government responsibility role" battery measured effects of a single unobserved attitude across individuals and societies. Attempts to substantiate this assumption offer sparse confirmatory evidence. Therefore, this research brings the most data and comprehensive measurement models thus far to investigate a single underlying attitude. Data from 1986 to 2017 in 43 countries suggest a latent ideal role attitude; however, measurement varies somewhat by historical institutions and levels of development across societies. At first the data seem to fail metric invariance tests as a first step in establishing the latent attitude. When applying corrections for a potential second attitude toward social insurance, and allowing for diverse effects of GDP, socialism, or Communist authoritarian institutional legacies, metric invariance comes into focus to a degree that most critics find acceptable. These results setup further scalar testing and descriptively demonstrate the neoliberalizaiton of preferences over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does public opinion react to inequality, and if so, how? The social harms caused by increasing inequality should cause public opinion to ramp up demand for social welfare protections. However, the public may react to inequality differently depending on institutional context. Using ISSP and WID data (1980‒2006), we tested these claims. In liberal institutional contexts (mostly English‐speaking), increasing income inequality predicted higher support for state provision of social welfare. In coordinated and universalist contexts (mostly of Europe), increasing inequality predicted less support. Historically higher income concentration predicted less public support, providing an account of the large variation in inequality within the respective liberal and coordinated contexts. The results suggest opinions in liberal societies – especially with higher historical inequality – reached the limits of inequality, reacting negatively; whereas in coordinated/universalist societies – especially with lower historical inequality – opinions moved positively, as if desiring more inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion-policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model 'feedback' effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion-policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion-policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross-national data are cross-sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross-national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion-policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research connects diversity to anti-welfare attitudes and lower levels of social welfare expenditure, yet most evidence comes from analyses of US states or comparisons of the United States to Europe. Comparative analyses of European nation-states, however, yield little evidence that immigration-measured at the country-level-reduces support for national welfare state programs. This is not surprising, given that research suggests that the impact of diversity occurs at smaller, sub-national geographic units. Therefore, in this article, we test the hypothesis that immigration undermines welfare attitudes by assessing the impact of immigration measured at the regional-level on individual-level support for redistribution, a comprehensive welfare state and immigrant's social rights. To do this, we combine data from the European Social Survey with a unique regional dataset compiled from national censuses, Eurostat and the European Election Database (13 countries, 114 regions and 23,213 individuals). Utilizing multilevel modeling, we find a negative relationship between regional percent foreign-born and support for redistribution as well as between regional percent foreign-born and support for a comprehensive welfare state. Objective immigration, however, does not increase opposition to immigrant's social rights (i.e. welfare chauvinism). We discuss the implications of these results and conclude that traditional welfare state attitudes and welfare chauvinism are distinct phenomena that should not be conflated in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersection of group dynamics and socioeconomic status theories is applied as a framework for the puzzling relationship of immigration and support for the welfare state in Western Europe. Group dynamics theories suggest that how individuals define their group boundaries moderates the impact of immigration on support for the welfare state. Immigrant presence should have the strongest effects for those with exclusive national group boundaries; weaker for those with conditionally inclusive boundaries based on reciprocity; and weakest or non-existent for those with inclusive group boundaries. Group boundaries should interact with material self-interest, leading individuals with less material security who are more likely to face social risks to be more supportive of the welfare state. Using data from the 4th European Social Survey linked to regional and national data, we find that group boundary salience plays a large moderating role in the relationship between immigration and native support for the welfare state, and that this role is intricately linked to material self-interest. Group dynamics should therefore be viewed in conjunction with existing structural welfare state theories as opposed to an alternative or isolated mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I extend the concept of observer effect into the realm of country-level secondary data analysis. When analyzing what appear to be the same secondary data using the same methods, macro-comparative researchers arrive at different results. I argue that this is a product of idiosyncratic variation directly or indirectly produced by the researchers. Even when this bias produces only small perturbations in results, the consequences may be very large. Using an influential study by Brooks and Manza I analyze this secondary observer effect (SOE). Two seemingly identical replications of their data by different researchers produced surprising variations. Reanalysis of these divergent values produces similar but not identical results. A rough calculation of the size of the SOEs suggests that they are about.32 standardized standard deviations across variable scores. Simulations of this size of error show that significant changes in findings occur as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Huntington claimed that today's major conflicts are most likely to erupt between religiously defined 'civilizations,' in particular between Christianity and Islam. Using World Values Surveys from 86 nations, we examine differences between Christians and Muslims in preferences for religious political leaders. The results suggest a marked difference between Muslims and Christians in their attitudes toward religious politicians, with Muslims more favorable by 20 points out of 100. Devoutness, education, degree of government corruption, and status as a formerly Communist state account for the difference. Little support is found for the clash-of-civilizations hypothesis. Instead, we find that a clash of individual beliefs-between the devout and the secular-along with enduring differences between the more developed and less developed world explains the difference between Islam and Christianity with regards to preferences for religious political leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare policies are a common feature of many societies and often strongly favored by the public. Research abounds on welfare policy differences across nations yet scholars pay less attention to why and how the public formulate opinions on welfare policies. The following analysis shows evidence that the public are not merely self-interested in their policy preferences. I propose instead that they have a further goal in mind unrelated to material gains: the reduction of social inequality. I investigate this possibility using survey data from large, representative national samples in Australia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Finland, and Poland (N = 13,294). Structural equation estimates correcting for measurement error show that those with economic egalitarian values are much more supportive of welfare policies consistent with instrumental rationality theory. These egalitarian values are more important than self-interest and national institutions in shaping preferences for government control of social services, price controls for basic needs, and subsidies for basic needs. This holds true after controlling for policy regime, attitudes toward government, family income, education, occupational status, sex, age, and church attendance and holds in all five nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]