Opinion polarization between groups with different social positions in societies’ structures of inequality, i.e. structural polarization, is a likely precondition for social conflict. This is because it indicates the presence of antagonistic social spaces where political attitudes align with material circumstances and many practices of everyday life. In this study, we investigate structural polarization between occupational classes by analyzing trends in opinions towards immigration and immigrants, and towards the European Union. These attitudes are main components of a potential globalization cleavage in European countries. Conceptually, we propose that we can only speak of structural polarization if there is both high within-class consensus and between-class dissimilarity. We propose a methodology based on three statistics that together allow a detailed description of structural polarization. In our empirical analysis, we pool data from three German high-quality surveys that include detailed information about individuals’ occupational class position. We find that the trends in the response distributions of the majority of our selected items do not indicate increasing class dissimilarity. Furthermore, the working class is low in consensus regarding its positions towards immigration, which makes class mobilization difficult, whereas the upper classes’ positions holds more homogenous positions. These findings do not support the idea of an encompassing class divide in general immigration or EU related attitudes.

No abstract

Research on opinion polarization has focused on growing divides in positions toward political issues between the more politically and ideologically engaged parts of the population. However, it is fundamentally difficult to track the alignment process between ideological group identity and issue positions because classically controversial political issues are already strongly associated with ideological or partisan identity. This study uses the COVID pandemic as an unique opportunity to investigate polarizing trends in the population. Pandemic management policies were not a politicized issue before COVID, but became strongly contested after governments all across the world initiated policies to contain the pandemic. We use data from the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP) to track trajectories in attitudes toward current COVID measures over the course of more than a year of the pandemic. We differentiate individuals by their ideological self-identity as measured by left-right self-placement. Results suggest that all ideological groups viewed the containment measures as similarly appropriate in the very beginning. However, already in the first weeks, individuals who identify as right-wing increasingly viewed the policies as too extreme, whereas centrists and left-wing identifiers viewed them as appropriate. Opinion differences between left-wing and right-wing identifiers solidified over the course of the pandemic, while centrists fluctuated between left and right self-identifiers. However, at the end of our observation period, there are signs of convergence between all groups. We discuss these findings from the perspective of theoretical models of opinion polarization and suggest that polarization dynamics are likely to stop when the political context (salience of certain issues and concrete material threats) changes.

The effect of parenthood on voting behaviour has been so far largely neglected in electoral research, and is usually assumed to have a negligible effect. However, the 2021 German federal election campaign faced the politicization of two main family- and children-related issues (i.e. COVID-19 pandemic and climate change). Based on a comparison of the 2017 and 2021 GLES post electoral surveys, we investigate the gendered effect of parenthood on voting behaviour. When controlling for education, age, religious denomination, religious services attendance, marital status and East/West Germany, our multinomial logistic regression analysis points to a significant parenthood effect for women with at least a child under 11 years old during the 2021 election: women with at least one child under the age of 11 have a more than 10 percentage point higher probability to vote for the Greens than women without underaged children at the 2021 election. Further analyses show that this effect can be explained by the larger importance allocated by women of young children to the climate change issue. We conclude by highlighting the potential relevance of parents as electorate force when family- and children-related issues are politicized during electoral campaigns.

This study re-investigates the often-found higher probability of enrolling in academic tracks of upper secondary education among immigrant compared to ethnic majority students, often referred to as the “positive ethnic choice effect”, from a causal inference perspective. The difference in enrollment is often attributed to “immigrant optimism”, a particularly high degree of ambition in students whose parents immigrated. In this study, we first theoretically disentangle multiple facets of immigrant optimism that can be found in the literature: (parental) educational aspirations, a drive for status occupational upward mobility, a high value attached to education and high general ambition. We then discuss the estimation strategies of previous studies in light of a causal mediation analysis framework. While we acknowledge that the explanation of ethnic enrollment gaps is largely a descriptive research question, much can be gained by using knowledge from causal inference. First, a causal inference framework forces us to clearly define our estimand of interest (in our case, a descriptive version of the controlled direct effect). Second, using estimation techniques from causal mediation analysis avoids potential difficulties in interpreting quantities that result from traditional regression modeling. We use marginal structural models and covariate balancing propensity scores to estimate the controlled direct effect of immigration background on choosing the academic upper secondary school track in the German educational system over vocational alternatives, holding different facets of immigrant optimism constant. Our results suggest that parental educational aspirations drive ethnic choice effects, while other facets of immigrant optimism play no role.