Dr. Zhiwu Wei (p), Dr Davide Luca, Prof Neil Lee, Prof Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

The political consequences of inequality have become a matter of mounting concern. Relative deprivation theory posits that frustration arising from comparisons with proximate reference groups can fuel protests. Yet research has concentrated overwhelmingly on the Global North, notwithstanding the acute wealth disparities experienced by the majority of the world's population in the Global South. To address this gap, we assemble novel, fine-grained estimates of relative wealth at the 2.4 km x 2.4 km grid level to derive measures of local wealth inequality, which we link to over 645,000 georeferenced protest events recorded from 2014 to 2018. Exploiting variation within subnational regions, we document a robust, positive association between local wealth inequality and protest incidence. We show that the inequality–protest relationship is anchored in individuals’ immediate surroundings. As the spatial radius defining ‘local’ expands, the association weakens, highlighting the primacy of experienced inequality. We also find that the inequality-protest link is mediated by national characteristics. The study advances the social sciences by furnishing novel empirical evidence on the micro-geographic underpinnings of political instability, demonstrating that inequality’s political effects hinge on proximity, local class structure and national institutional environment.

Dr. Conor O'Driscoll (p), Dr. Luise Koeppen

Declining trust in political institutions and the territorial clustering of political discontent have become defining features of contemporary Europe. While distrust is often analysed at the national level, far less attention has been paid to how subnational institutional environments shape citizens’ evaluations of governance. We argue that institutional trust is formed within places: it reflects not only corruption levels, but how corruption is experienced in territorially and historically embedded contexts. To test this, we link harmonized regional measures of grand and petty corruption to individual-level data from Rounds 1–10 of the European Social Survey (2000–2020), employing cross-classified multilevel models that account for regions, countries, and birth cohorts. We find that grand corruption exerts a substantially stronger negative effect on trust than petty corruption, underscoring the importance of systemic signals of elite misconduct. The corruption–trust relationship is further conditioned by urban–rural location and regional economic trajectories, with stronger effects in economically lagging and rural regions. Cohort and country effects also matter, indicating that institutional trust reflects path-dependent expectations shaped by shared regime exposure. Together, the results show that distrust is neither purely contemporaneous nor purely national, but produced within territorially differentiated and historically conditioned institutional environments.

Dr. Mattia Sfrattoni (p), Morgan Raux, Riccardo Turati, Jérôme Valette

In recent years, support for far-right and anti-immigrant parties has risen across many advanced democracies, raising concerns about the evolution of public attitudes toward migration. At the same time, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that individual attitudes toward immigration are remarkably stable over time. This apparent tension between political volatility and attitudinal persistence raises a central question: under which conditions do immigration attitudes change? Electoral campaigns represent one potential mechanism. Campaign periods intensify political communication, amplify media coverage, and increase issue salience, potentially affecting how individuals evaluate immigration. This paper studies how federal election campaigns influence immigration worries in Germany. We ask whether immigration concerns move systematically in the months before and after elections and whether election-cycle effects became stronger after the 2015 refugee crisis, which marked a structural break in the politicization of migration. We exploit longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) over the period 1998–2024 and focus on German-born respondents aged 18–82. Our identification strategy leverages quasi-random variation in interview timing relative to federal elections. Because the SOEP is fielded continuously throughout the year, individuals are interviewed at different distances from election days for reasons unrelated to their political preferences. Combining within-year timing variation with individual fixed effects and election–non-election year pair fixed effects, we identify election-cycle effects from within-individual changes in reported immigration worries. We document three main findings. First, we find a statistically significant negative pre-election effect: individuals interviewed within 120 days before a federal election are approximately three percentage points less likely to report being worried about immigration. This result suggests that campaigns do not mechanically intensify anti-immigrant concerns and may temporarily shift issue attention or evaluative frames. Second, election-cycle effects become more pronounced after 2015, indicating that increased politicization heightened the sensitivity of attitudes to electoral proximity. Third, substantial regional heterogeneity emerges: campaign effects vary systematically with baseline migrant shares, AfD vote shares, and the East–West divide, highlighting the importance of local political and demographic contexts. Overall, our findings show that immigration attitudes in Germany are broadly stable yet responsive to electoral dynamics within individuals. The interaction between electoral competition and public opinion appears conditional rather than mechanical, shaped by both temporal shocks and regional patterns of politicization.