The Institute for Social Research (German: Institut für Sozialforschung, IfS) is a research organization for sociology and continental philosophy, best known as the institutional home of the Frankfurt School and critical theory.
Do enfranchisement reforms change the demographic composition of elected bodies? While previous research has demonstrated positive effects of suffrage extensions on political participation and the substantive representation of group interests, effects on descriptive representation remain understudied. Focusing on voting age reforms, we hypothesize that lowering the voting age to 16 increases the shares of selected and elected young candidates via changes in party and voter behavior. Drawing on evidence from two Norwegian voting age trials and a difference-in-differences design, we show that municipalities with a lowered voting age saw significantly more young candidates elected. This was driven by changes in voter behavior: While parties did not select or prioritize more young candidates, voters supported them with higher shares of preference votes. Exploring mechanisms, we find tentative evidence that treatment effects depended on voters who were not directly affected by the reform. Also, effects appear to slightly weaken in the second election with a lowered voting age.
While perpetrators of anti-Jewish harassment and violence are a small minority in democratic societies, they rely on a larger number of people who justify such aggression or silently condone it. Using data from nationally representative surveys of the Norwegian population, I report two studies investigating whether endorsement of Holocaust inversion-the belief that Israel treats Palestinians as badly as Jews were treated during World War II-is associated with (a) justification of harassment and violence against Jews and (b) refusal to take a stance against such aggression. Study 1 (N = 1,575) found support for both hypotheses. In a preregistered replication, Study 2 (N = 1,653) confirmed these results. Follow-up analyses found that endorsement of Holocaust inversion was also associated with refusal to answer questions measuring blatant antisemitic prejudice. The findings support theorizing that sees Holocaust inversion as a socially more acceptable vehicle for expressing and legitimizing antisemitic hostility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Educational inequalities in childlessness have grown across cohorts. It remains unclear to what extent this development was driven by a decline in resources and abilities in groups with low education. Using high-quality Norwegian population registers (n=683,882 men born 1963-1991), we find that increasing educational inequalities in childlessness are mirrored by growing educational gaps in employment participation and income. Educational groups have diverged on resources (parental income rank) but converged on abilities (relative cognitive ability). Regression models show that changes in the composition of educational groups in terms of parental income explain 6%-7% of the growth in educational gaps in childlessness, employment participation and income. In contrast, gaps in life outcomes would have grown more than observed had educational groups not converged on cognitive abilities. We conclude that relative education-specific changes in financial resources and cognitive abilities explain little, if any, of the growing educational inequalities in the life outcomes studied.
Child poverty has been steadily rising across high-income countries, including Scandinavia, raising concerns about its spatial concentration and potential impact on inequality. This study uses administrative data to investigate the development of geographic concentration of child poverty in Norway from 2004 to 2022, with a focus on variations across immigrant and native-born children. We analyze neighborhood poverty trends and measure overexposure to capture shifts in spatial inequality. Our key findings are that segregation, as measured by overexposure, has not increased over time despite a rise in child poverty. However, substantial differences persist, where overexposure to low-income neighbors is particularly pronounced among low-income immigrant children. Additionally, while aggregate levels of overexposure have remained stable, we observe local spatial shifts, particularly in the capital, Oslo, with some areas exhibiting increasing overexposure. Together, these patterns highlight persistent disparities among children, with potential consequences for child development and social integration.
Abstract This study investigates mechanisms underlying girls’ academic advantage over boys by examining the role of physical and pubertal maturation. Using longitudinal data from the Add Health study, we analyzed whether sex differences in maturation explain girls’ higher grade 10 GPAs, and whether these associations are mediated by planfulness or impulse control. Path analysis revealed that females’ higher GPAs were partially explained by their advanced physical maturation as rated by the interviewer (explaining 2.4 percent) and greater impulse control (explaining 7.7 percent), controlling for cognitive ability and other potential confounders. Still, a significant direct effect of biological sex on GPA remained, suggesting additional unexplained mechanisms. Planfulness predicted GPA but did not vary by sex, and neither planfulness nor impulse control were associated with perceived relative maturation.
