Grant Recipients Fall Semester 2025
Congratulations 🎉 to the 5th cohort of grantees of the URPP Inequality Research Fund. The fund supports innovative research on the politics of inequality.
We are thrilled that we can support 10 new projects through the fund.
Recipients and Project Descriptions
Resolving the Resource Curse: Evaluating the impact of a community mining policy in Ghana
Despite the vibrant scholarly debate on the impacts of mining, considerable scope remains to better understand how government-led policy reforms address the resource curse at the local level. The literature presents different solutions to the resource curse, including expanding local participation (Hamenoo et al, 2025), disbursing revenues to citizens (Cust et al., 2022), promoting transparency and accountability (Armand et al. 2020), and strengthening corporate social responsibility (Lefoll et al., 2025). However, only a handful of these solutions have been systematically evaluated. Sandefur et al. (2022), find experimental evidence that policy deliberation influences citizens’ preferences for prudent management of resource revenues. Similarly, Armand et al (2020) show that providing information to citizens on major resource discoveries while facilitating deliberation decreases the likelihood of community violence.
Beyond the limited set of studies, a gap remains in the literature on the extent to which government-led reforms are successful in delivering local development and better environmental governance while mitigating the negative impacts of mining. This is important considering the recent wave of Community Mining Schemes (CMS) being introduced in developing countries as a way of formalizing community participation in mining, enhancing local livelihoods, and securing environmental sustainability. While some qualitative studies suggest that CMS have potential (Harmenoo et al. 2025; Hilson et al 2022), to the best of our knowledge, they have not been systematically evaluated. We examine the impact of a community-based mining reform policy implemented in Ghana on local livelihoods and environmental sustainability. We combine a quasi-experimental design with qualitative analysis of policy-level and community-level experiences.
Fabienne Eisenring & Verena Reidinger
Gendered Domestic Migration Patterns in the Knowledge Economy
In recent decades, political divides between urban and rural areas have intensified, and gender divides have become increasingly salient. At the same time, ongoing societal transformations have expanded women’s individual choices (van Ditmars and Shorrocks 2025), including the choice where to live. Yet, we know little about how these developments affect women’s domestic migration behaviour. Are women more likely than men to move to urban areas? And if so, are political considerations part of their motivations? We argue that women in rural areas may perceive a sense of ideological misalignment between their own attitudes and the prevailing norms within their communities, which may motivate them to relocate. Using panel data from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, we examine whether women are more likely than men to migrate from rural to urban areas and whether ideological predispositions play a stronger role in women’s residential choices. To uncover the mechanisms behind these patterns, we complement our analysis with original survey data from the Netherlands. We employ a pairwise comparison experiment (Lauderdale and Blumenau 2025) to test whether women give greater weight than men to political and cultural place-based factors when deciding where to live. By integrating gender and spatial dimensions, our project contributes to a deeper understanding of how urban–rural divides and gender-based conflicts intersect and mutually reinforce one another in the knowledge economy.
Giuliano Formisano & Anna Clemente
From Concern to Action: How Collective Efficacy Shapes Attitudes Toward Inequality
Why does greater awareness of inequality so rarely translate into stronger public demand for redistribution? Experimental research has shown that providing information about inequality often increases concern but has inconsistent effects on policy preferences. One underexplored possibility is that information, while raising awareness, will not translate into policy demands unless citizens believe that solutions to change the status quo are possible and can be reached democratically. This project investigates whether collective efficacy—the belief that groups can produce such change—bridges the gap between concern about inequality and policy preferences. To support redistributive policies, citizens may need to see not only that inequality is a problem, but also that collective action can address it. We employ a three-arm survey experiment (N=3,500) across France, the UK, and Germany. Participants are randomized into 3 conditions: a placebo; a treatment providing only information on inequality levels (T1); a treatment combining this information with a vignette designed to raise perceptions of collective efficacy, describing past mobilizations that led to the eight-hour workday (T2). Outcomes measure support for progressive policies. Further, open-ended responses will be coded using machine learning to assess whether collective efficacy promotes action-oriented thinking about inequality. We hypothesize that information alone will have limited impact, while coupling it with collective efficacy messaging will strengthen policy support. Effects should vary by country according to traditions of labor mobilization. This research redirects attention from informational interventions toward perceptions of collective capacity, emphasizing the importance of believing that change is possible.
Surveillance Technology and Unequal Chilling Effects on Political Mobilization
How do advances in state surveillance technology shape contentious political action in hybrid regimes? Although political inequality is often understood as unequal access to resources or institutions, it also emerges through differential vulnerability to repression. Existing research has examined violent state responses to protest, yet we know far less about how surveillance alters political behavior before any direct repression occurs. Surveillance can generate strong deterrent effects: when citizens fear being monitored, they may refrain from protesting, voicing dissent, or supporting opposition actors. These effects are hard to detect and are not experienced equally. For example, ethnic and religious minorities, facing higher perceived risks, may self-censor more intensely, thus deepening political inequalities.
Despite the rapid global expansion of digital surveillance, we lack causal evidence on whether such technologies reduce political participation and how their effects vary across social groups. This project addresses that gap by collecting micro-level evidence on how surveillance shapes individuals’ willingness to engage politically, and whether these effects disproportionately burden vulnerable populations. I will implement a survey experiment in Serbia, a hybrid regime marked by democratic backsliding and expanding surveillance capacity.
The project will provide the first experimental evidence on how surveillance innovations reshape political inequality in hybrid regimes, advancing broader debates on technology, repression, and civic engagement in autocratizing contexts.
Philipp Kerler & Valentina Petrovic
The Right Angle: Urban Structures, Social Ties, and Voting Behaviour
Rising illiberalism challenges many democracies today. A substantial literature demonstrates that discontent with structural economic change fuels support for illiberal politicians. However, this literature is partly incomplete on several accounts. First, it focuses on economic decline, ignoring the economic ascent that preceded the decline. Second, it neglects the role of physical structures that structural change creates and leaves behind. Third, it typically theorizes at either the individual level or a higher geographic level of aggregation. We aim to address all three of those points by asking: How does industrial legacy affect contemporary political behavior through physical structures? We investigate the case of Trstenik, a Serbian town that rapidly industrialized during the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Rapid industrialization came with radical changes in the built environment. Large manufacturing complexes were built, and entirely new worker colonies were erected within a short time. This reshaping created physically different neighborhoods, some characterized by homogenous, gridded blocks, some more heterogeneous. Nowadays, large parts of the former factory are in ruins, exposing some neighborhoods to a visual reminder of economic decline, while other neighborhoods overlook the still functioning part of the factory. We expect that homogenous, gridded neighborhoods facilitate the formation of distinct social network patterns that shape how the perceived economic reality translates into political behavior. Using in-depth interviews, survey data, and cadastral maps, we examine how sorting, socialization, and visual experience shape political behavior, advancing research on the structural economic roots of support for illiberal politicians.
The Social Contract of Managing Structural Transformations
Finding effective responses to structural economic transformations is a central challenge of the 21st century, and, often, political elites avoid taking action to prevent backlash among affected people. At the same time, there is substantial contextual variation (for example between countries) in how much people, and particularly the "losers of change”, demand future-oriented solutions to transformations. Hence, the goal of my projects is to understand equilibria where people agree to ambitious political action and those where they agree on preventing action. I argue that it is decisive what change-related expectations people have, namely, whether they expect the state to manage change by preserving the status quo of people’s livelihoods or supporting people adapting to change. This reflects the idea that political preferences follow from a social contract between the government and its citizens. This provides an alternative explanation to the predominant way of deriving preferences from the structural position of people during societal transformations. The funding from the Inequality Research Fund will enable conducting survey experiments to test how change-related expectations drive people's preferred responses to structural change. Furthermore, I will analyze how governments and firms influence change-related expectations through the decisions they make while managing change. This will demonstrate the factors that lock people’s politics into demanding the preservation of the status quo, but also ways to foster support for future-oriented solutions to contemporary transformations.
The Redistributional Logic of Inheritance
Alexis de Tocqueville noted that with equal inheritance, “the last trace of ranks and hereditary distinctions is destroyed,” highlighting its long-recognized role in promoting equality. By replacing systems that favored eldest sons, equal inheritance should alter the economic role of women and reduce wealth concentration. Although crucial to 18th- and 19th-century reformers, scholars have only recently revisited its broader consequences. We extend this work by asking: did equal inheritance laws affect rural and urban communities differently, and what were the effects for women? These questions have implications for our understanding of the relationship between political and economic development and equality.
Focusing on Norway’s 1854 inheritance reform, the project will analyze consequences for women and the general population. Before the reform, daughters were disadvantaged vis-à -vis sons when it came to inheritance, receiving half as much as sons. In principle, the reform gave daughters an equal share, mirroring other reforms implemented in Europe around this time. Norway’s temporal and potential geographical variety in inheritance regimes makes it an ideal case for studying how this type of economic reform shapes society. With the grant, we plan to digitize the 1903–1908 Norwegian cadaster and harmonize it with the 1838 and 1886 versions to create a local-level panel dataset of overall and gendered landholding inequality. If impacts vary with local economic structure—with rural areas being able to avoid full equality in practice—it suggests that equal inheritance was among the tools landed elites could use to check the rise of industrial elites.
Melanie Sauter & Christoph Steinert
Geography of Prisons (GeoPrison)
The GeoPrison project investigates how the geography of political imprisonment reflects strategies of authoritarian control. The study argues that the location of prisons holding prominent dissidents is not random but a deliberate choice that serves distinct political purposes. Some regimes isolate prisoners in remote areas to hide repression and prevent unrest, while others detain them near centers of power to signal dominance and control.
The project makes a theoretical and empirical contribution by linking political imprisonment to the spatial organization of authoritarian rule. It also examines how these detention patterns intersect with local inequality and protest behavior. Specifically, it hypothesizes that regions hosting salient political prisoners, especially economically disadvantaged ones, are more likely to experience protest mobilization.
Empirically, the study proceeds in three phases: (1) defining and piloting the concept of “salient political prisoners” using cases from Russia and Syria; (2) globally collecting and validating data on such prisoners and their detention sites from 2010–2024 using Amnesty International reports, LLM-assisted searches, and manual verification; and (3) conducting spatial and comparative analyses linking imprisonment, inequality, and protest. The outcome will include a public dataset, academic papers, and an interactive map. The funding will support four research assistants.
Direct Democracy and Inequality: How Identity-Relevant Losses Shape Democratic Support in Direct Democracy
Direct democracy is widely viewed as a corrective to declining democratic support by giving citizens more influence over political decisions. Yet even when institutions allow for direct participation, the experience of losing can be unevenly distributed. Popular votes isolate single issues and repeatedly activate societal cleavages, making defeats highly salient for groups whose core identities or worldviews are at stake. While some citizens consistently see preferences affirmed at the ballot box, others face cumulative, symbolic losses that may signal a lack of influence in key public decisions. This project investigates when and why such identity-based losses erode democratic attitudes. The central component is a survey experiment in Switzerland that manipulates exposure to personalized ledgers of repeated defeats on culturally or economically salient issues. By tailoring scenarios to respondents’ ideological positions, the experiment isolates the mechanism: does perceiving oneself as structurally on the losing side of direct democracy reduce institutional trust, external efficacy, and confidence in fellow citizens as legitimate decision-makers? The focus extends beyond political trust to examine whether direct democracy can also undermine social trust when citizens themselves are the source of defeat. In parallel, an observational analysis uses latent trait modeling (IRT) to construct a long-run measure of accumulated structural losses based on historical popular votes. This complementary evidence assesses whether the consequences of exclusion persist outside experimental settings. The project contributes by showing how direct democracy can unintentionally reproduce unequal democratic experiences—and how cumulative losing may shift trust from institutions to society itself.
Peer Effects and Gender Inequality in Political Leadership: Evidence from the European Parliament
Gender equality in political leadership has advanced over recent decades, yet women remain underrepresented in positions of real influence. This project investigates whether informal peer networks among female legislators can help close this gap. We focus on the European Parliament, where a quasi-random seating arrangement within parties provides a natural experiment to identify peer effects on women’s legislative activity, career advancement, and rhetorical behavior.
Combining multiple data sources on Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from 1999–2024, we merge records of committee memberships, candidate list rankings, and over 300 thousand plenary speeches. Using this dataset, we first document persistent gender disparities across committees, speech visibility, and electoral ranking. We then exploit alphabetical seating assignments to estimate how proximity to female peers affects women’s legislative engagement and career progression. The empirical strategy combines quasi-experimental variation in seat assignment with natural language processing (NLP) analysis of speech content and tone.
Our findings will shed light on the causal role of peer networks in shaping women’s political outcomes, with implications for broader debates on representation, leadership, and institutional design. By identifying the mechanisms—such as mentorship, collaboration, and shared identity—that drive these effects, the project contributes to both political science and gender studies, offering actionable insights for policies promoting equality in political institutions.
In early fall 2026, we will have a progress workshop of the projects where you will get the chance to learn more about the findings. Also, we expect to be able to launch a 6th call for projects, probably in late 2026/early 2027, so stay tuned.
For the grant committee: Silja Häusermann, Stefanie Walter, Thomas Malang and Thomas Kurer