POLITSOLID: The Extended Solidarity Game with Different Levels of Information

This experiment improves the measurement of political solidarities, i.e. the individual willingness to support public redistribution in favour of other people. In order to explore behavioural instruments that can be implemented in online surveys, we focus on an extended version of the solidarity game (Ockenfels/Selten 1998) that we adapt to the online environment and contextualise for our purposes with different levels of information. The original instrument was designed to measure implicit reciprocity and the amount of empathy that makes deciders to imagine themselves being in the losers’ shoes. Why can some social groups maintain high levels of solidarity while others fail? Regarding the political domain, transparency about other individual’s behavour is often presumed to positively affect participation and social cohesion. However, the role of transparency on the behavioural salience of social norms is less clear. We ask in this study: How does transparency about solidarity affect the willingness to act in solidarity? Solidarity is voluntary compensation to group members if they experience an income loss due to a random adverse event (e.g., natural disaster). A credible commitment to solidarity is crucial to achieving and maintaining solidarity within social groups. This study tests the causal effect of transparency about the social norm of solidarity on actual behavior. This study tests the effect of transparency about solidarity on solidarity behavior in social groups. We know that subjects’ assumptions about the prevalence of a specific social norm (e.g., honesty, cooperativeness) in groups strongly affect their choice to adhere to the norm and act accordingly. In other words, adherence to a social norm is conditional on others’ adherence. Previous research, for example, shows that honest people start to cheat more once they know about the number of “cheaters” in their group. Likewise, in public goods games, the willingness to contribute among those who contribute in the first round declines once they learn about the number of free riders in their group.