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Refugees arriving in Western countries spend long periods, often over a year, as asylum seekers. We examine how the period affects asylum seekers' institutional and interpersonal trust. Drawing on theories of need gratification, we suggest that several needs are unfulfilled during this period of existential limbo. Still, some aspects in the new society are positive, especially in Sweden, the host country of this study. To study these combined forces, we rely on repeated interviews with the same asylum seekers as well as other quantitative approaches. Results show that both types of trust are reduced over time, suggesting that the negative aspects take precedence. We also present results based on a matching analysis, which indicate that interpersonal trust at the beginning of the asylum-seeking process is higher compared to similar refugees in Jordan and Lebanon. Overall, our results show that trust can be highly malleable in certain circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protection of civilians from human rights violations has increasingly become a global priority. The wars in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and the development of the Women, Peace and Security framework have placed conflict-related sexual violence on the global protection agenda. Prior research has found that international attention to, and intervention in, conflicts is in fact more likely when there are reports of widespread sexual violence, regardless of overall conflict intensity. This article theorizes and empirically examines the micro-level underpinnings of these patterns. We hypothesize that individuals are more likely to support military intervention in conflicts with prevalent sexual violence as opposed to other types of conflict violence. The reason lies in gendered protection norms, based in benevolent sexism, that continue to have traction also in Western societies. In equivalent survey experiments carried out in the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden, we find that support for international intervention is highest in sexual violence conflicts. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the responsibility to protect and gendered perceptions of victimhood mediate this effect. A follow-up experiment in the United States provides further evidence of a gendered protection norm as a core mechanism driving our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring corruption has become a global industry. An important and commonly used data source are several large-scale multi-country projects that survey citizens directly about their perceptions and experiences of corruption. Such indicators are regularly used by political scientists to test theories on political attitudes and behavior. However, we still know little about the quality of many of these measures. This paper deploys a large survey with two embedded experiments to investigate two potential sources of bias in indicators based on citizens' perceptions and experiences of corruption, stemming from political bias and sensitivity bias. First, I draw upon research on economic perceptions and argue that respondents are likely to respond in a political manner when asked how they perceive the level of corruption in their country. I test this argument by experimentally priming respondents' political affiliations before asking for their perception of corruption. Second, I argue that standard questions probing peoples' corruption experiences are likely to be subject to sensitivity bias. I test this second argument by constructing a list experiment. Overall, the results show strong and predictable sources of response bias that also vary significantly between important subgroups. I discuss implications for researchers and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a panel study where one survey was conducted immediately after a terrorist attack in central Stockholm, with over 20,000 participants, we examine the possibility that first-hand experiences with terror increases effects compared to people located elsewhere in Sweden. We use matching and as-if random variation in our data to identify the effect of personal proximity. While we find that people close to the attack perceived themselves as more affected, attesting to the vividness of the experience, we find no evidence of stronger rally effects, greater outgroup dislike, preferences for security policies or emotional effects. The results challenge previous theories on public opinion change in the aftermath of vivid events. In line with prior research, however, the results indicate that public opinion among people across Sweden did change on a range of issues. These general effects occurred uniformly, regardless of geographic location in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surveys show that citizens in all parts of the world have a strong distaste for corruption. At the same time, and contrary to the predictions of democratic theory, politicians involved in the most glaring abuse of public office often continue to receive electoral support. Using an original survey experiment conducted in Spain, this article explores a previously understudied aspect of this apparent paradox: the importance of viable and clean political alternatives. The results suggest that voters do punish political corruption when a clean alternative exists, even when the corrupt candidate is very appealing in other respects. However, when only given corrupt alternatives, respondents become much more likely to tolerate a candidate accused of corruption—even when given a convenient "no-choice" option. I discuss how these results can help us understand corruption voting and why some societies seem to be stuck in a high-corruption equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual violence (SV) in conflict is increasingly politicized at both the international and domestic levels. Where SV in conflict is prevalent, we argue international actors perceive gender to be salient and push for a gendered response. Simultaneously, women mobilize politically in response to the threat to their security that conflict-related SV constitutes, making demands for greater representation in politics with the goal of improving societal conditions for themselves. Jointly, we theorize the pressures from above and below push governments in conflict-affected states toward adopting gender policies. We test this theoretical framework in the case of gender quota adoption. We find that states with prevalent wartime SV indeed adopt gender quotas sooner and at higher rates than states experiencing other civil conflicts and than states experiencing no conflict in the same period. These gender quotas, we further show, are not mere window dressing but actually increase women's legislative representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education has consistently been found to be positively related to political participation, electoral turnout, civic engagement, political knowledge, and democratic attitudes and opinions. Previous research has, however, not sufficiently acknowledged the large existing between- and within-country variations in institutional quality when studying this relationship. This study asks the question: how do highly educated, well-informed, and critical citizens react to a political system with low-quality institutions; a system with high levels of corruption? Researchers have in recent years started to acknowledge corruption as a relevant factor in explaining democratic attitudes and behavior. However, how corruption interacts with individual characteristics in shaping political behavior is largely unexplored in the literature. This paper focuses on the interaction between corruption and education with regard to different political attitudes and democratic behavior. Using both individual- and country-level data from 31 democracies the results show that corruption thwarts many of the positive effects of education with regard to politics: The results indicate that when corruption is high, educated and politically sophisticated citizens are as likely as low-educated citizens to feel resignation with regard to formal political institutions. This, in turn, is likely to affect patterns of political participation among these citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses an issue previously neglected in the research on support for populist parties: How do perceptions of the local quality of government (QoG) and local service delivery affect voters' propensity to vote for a populist party? It argues that personal experience with poor QoG makes voters more likely to support populist parties. The argument highlights the interplay between supply and demand factors in explaining populist support and discusses why populist parties have been particularly successful in certain regions in Europe. A unique dataset from the Quality of Government Institute that surveys citizens' perception of QoG in their area is used to estimate both individual- and regional-level models of the link between perceived local QoG and populist support in Europe. The empirical results show a strong and robust association between within-country variation in QoG and support for populist parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]