Objective This article tests how education and political affiliation shape individuals' political attitudes toward free-market economics. Prior research finds that higher education levels are associated with more liberal political attitudes toward cultural issues-the "liberalization thesis." However, this pattern may not hold for economic issues, especially surrounding free-market economics.Methods For analysis, this article uses data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to model the association between political affiliation and respondent education with free-market attitudes.Results In contrast with the liberalization thesis, we find that at higher levels of education, Democrat and Republican respondents are more polarized, respectively, in their attitudes toward free-market economics compared to their Democrat and Republican peers at lower levels of education.Conclusion Our findings demonstrate the complexity of education's association with political attitudes, contrasting with commonly held beliefs about unified liberalizing effects of education. One plausible explanation is that education reinforces prior held economic attitudes, leading to greater consistency between political affiliation and attitudes toward the free market.
Objectives Politics can be a social enterprise, with many of its activities taking place in public, and online engagement often involving others. As such, personality traits, such as extraversion, that define sociability may impact levels of socially related political involvement. While various works have examined the relationship between extraversion and political engagement, most have overlooked a key mechanism-the perceived pleasantness of political activities. This paper draws on research in political science and psychology to answer two questions: (1) Do extraverts find political activities more pleasant than non-extraverts? (2) Does gender impact the relationship between extraversion and the pleasantness of political activities?Methods With several preregistered hypotheses, we test the links between extraversion, gender, pleasantness, and political activities. We collected novel survey data during the 2020 U.S. election cycle, measuring respondents' extraversion and the perceived pleasantness of social and nonsocial activities that either relate to politics or not. Ordinary least squares regression is used to model the relationship between extraversion and the perceived happiness felt during these activities. We split the sample and analysis by the political, social, and conflictual nature of these activities. We finally estimate the interaction between gender and extraversion.Results Our data suggest that individuals who score high on extraversion tend to rate nearly all political activities as more pleasant, but that this is driven neither by the social nor the conflictual character of political activities. We further find indications that extraverted men find political activities, and conflictual political activities in particular, more pleasant than equally extraverted women.Conclusion We show that extraverts are more likely than introverts to enjoy political activities. However, in contrast to the often-hypothesized mechanism, this is not driven by the social (or conflictual) character of political acts. This might suggest that politics may be perceived as social regardless of the activity itself or that other mechanisms link extraversion to political engagement. While extraversion predicts the pleasantness of politics similarly for men and women, a gender gap emerges at high levels of extraversion, which could help further illuminate the hidden mechanisms behind the gender gap in political engagement.
Objective This study investigates skin-tone discrimination in the Mexican dating market. We examine whether men's match responses differ between otherwise identical dating-app profiles that vary only by skin tone, and whether these responses differ by men's own skin tone or education.Methods We implement a correspondence study across four Mexican cities. We created pairs of dating-app profiles of women, identical in all details except that, within each pair, the photographs were digitally adjusted to show either light or dark skin. This design holds facial features and profile content constant. We analyze men's match responses to quantify the skin-tone penalty.Results We document clear discrimination in favor of the light-skinned profile. The match rate is 54% for light skin versus 35% for dark skin. We find no evidence of same-skin-tone homophily: darker-skinned men discriminate against the dark-skinned profile at rates similar to lighter-skinned men. Regarding education, we do not observe that darker-skinned men with a university degree discriminate more than those with lower education.Conclusions The findings show that skin tone shapes preference-stage decisions in the Mexican dating market. These results complement observational evidence on partnering and colorism by documenting discrimination at an early stage of relationship formation, before actual dating, partnering, or marriage outcomes are observed.
Objective This study investigates the conditions under which authoritarian regimes increase public goods provision. The research posits that authoritarian regimes are more likely to provide public goods when they possess both the motivation, stemming from the adoption of multiparty elections, and the capacity, which includes extractive, administrative, and coercive capabilities.Methods Empirical analysis is conducted on a panel of 95 authoritarian regimes between 1970 and 2015 using the Driscoll-Kraay estimator. Two robustness tests are performed.Results The findings reveal that the introduction of a competitive party system in an authoritarian regime is negatively associated with public goods provision. However, authoritarian regimes with state capacity reaching the 75th percentile are significantly more likely to prioritize broad public goods in their budget allocation when adopting multiparty elections.Conclusions This study suggests that while the adoption of multiparty elections might incentivize authoritarian regimes, the requirement for these regimes to respond effectively to such institutional changes is the capacity to do so. The study contributes to the understanding of the interplay between democratic institutions and state capacity in authoritarian contexts, providing an explanation of within-regime variables and demonstrating how pre-existing differences influence policy outcomes.
Objective Parenthood can deepen concern for children's future but also tighten household resources. This study examines how these competing pressures shape the association between the number of children and willingness to bear environmental costs in the United States and South Korea.Methods Using 2021 US and Korean GSS data from the shared ISSP Environment module, we estimate country-specific logistic regressions and pooled models of willingness to pay higher prices and taxes for environmental protection.Results In the main binary models, willingness declines with each additional child in the United States but increases in South Korea. The Korea-US difference is statistically significant for both outcomes and remains so under age restrictions, controls for the number of co-residents, ordered-logit coding, and survey weights. In categorical models, the gap widens across parity categories and is largest at three or more children. The difference is more stable than either country-specific estimate, and education, perceived environmental impact, and age group do not systematically moderate it.Conclusion The association between the number of children and environmental cost-bearing differs across institutional settings. The findings are consistent with childrearing costs operating more as immediate constraints in one context and more as future-oriented investments in the other.
