In times of hardship, politicians often leverage citizens’ discontent and scapegoat minorities to obtain political support. This paper tests whether blaming migrants for a health crisis affects social, political, and economic attitudes and behaviors. Through an online nationally-representative survey experiment in Italy, we analyze the effects of such narratives using information-provision treatments. Results show that narratives associating immigration with health threats do not generate sizeable add-on effects compared to those based on immigration only. If anything, they increase disappointment towards co-nationals, reduce institutional trust, and undermine partisanship among extreme-right supporters. Results are consistent with a theoretical framework where party credibility and institutional trust are influenced by political discourse. Our experiment underpins the prediction that political campaigns based on extreme narratives can be ineffective or socially and politically counterproductive, providing an example of how populism can backfire.

We examine the relationship between beliefs about and attitudes towards immigrants and intergroup contact between natives and migrants in eastern Germany, a region characterized by anti-immigrant sentiment. Using probability-based survey data, we randomly vary respondents’ access to a signal about the true size of the immigrant population in the region. Respondents who receive the signal show more supportive attitudes toward immigration, with effect sizes being more pronounced for attitudes toward high-skilled immigrants. Importantly, estimating conditional average treatment effects shows that respondents who have less contact with immigrants prior to our intervention respond more strongly to the treatment. Additional findings suggest that the level of intergroup contact and biased beliefs about immigrants are complementary targets for information campaigns on immigration.

This paper provides novel evidence on the impact of tax decentralization on citizens preferences for redistribution. In a large-scale survey experiment implemented in Spain, an information treatment explains respondents the normative power which regions exercise over personal income taxation. First stage results show that the treatment increases the salience of this feature by 40 percentage points. The treatment increases respondents aversion against inequality, but decreases their support for higher taxes on the rich. Both results are explained by respondents' identities. The effect on inequality is driven by individuals with a stronger regional than national identity, while the rejection of higher taxes on the rich is driven by participants which identify more with the nation than the region. Heterogeneous effects on the trust in the central or regional government confirm this pattern.

We conduct a survey experiment with four thousand German respondents and provide information on two measures of gender inequality, separately or jointly: the gender gap in earnings and the gender gap in pensions. We analyze the effect of providing information on views on the importance of reducing gender inequality and on agreement with the adoption of policies targeted at different stages of the life cycle and aimed at reducing inequality. We find that providing information on both gaps changes perceptions of the importance of reducing gender inequality and of adopting policy measures to this end. Information on only one gap tends to have insignificant effects on preferences for policy adoption. We provide insights into the importance of individual views on female disadvantages in the labor market, personal experiences of inequality, and social norms as correlates of preferences for reducing gender inequality and policy interventions.