Research

IPE scholars often view financial liberalization as a uniform process, assuming that once a country opens its financial sector, it does so broadly and equally for all foreign partners, both in theory and practice. However, this perspective overlooks a crucial reality: financial openness is far more selective. What drives this selectivity? I argue that cultural identity factors—specifically cultural distance and internal diversity—play a key role in shaping financial relationships between countries. Using country-level panel data, I present empirical evidence showing that cultural distance acts as a barrier to deeper financial integration, while internal cultural diversity is linked to more open financial policies. This research challenges the notion that financial liberalization follows a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model, offering a new perspective on the selective nature of global financial engagement. The findings help explain why some international financial partnerships flourish while others falter, despite formal cooperation. Recognizing this selectivity encourages more realistic expectations about financial openness and promotes the development of cooperation frameworks that better reflect the complexities of global economic relationships.

What drives individuals to engage financially with certain foreign entities while avoiding others? This paper examines the role of cultural identity in financial decision-making on a global scale, with cues of cultural similarity or difference triggering cognitive biases toward in-group favoritism. Through a pre-registered behavioral experiment with a national U.S. sample, I investigate how cultural proximity and diversity affect individuals' willingness to engage financially with foreign entities across varying degrees of perceived ‘out-group’ status—and how these interactions influence preferences regarding foreign economic presence in the local market. Findings reveal that in-group favoritism strongly shapes financial behavior and attitudes, leading to biases that can undermine democratic values, social cohesion, and human capital. By uncovering the roots of cooperation—and barriers to it—this study sheds light on essential dynamics that affect both domestic society and international relations.

Conventional wisdom holds that the public lacks the knowledge or interest to meaningfully engage with complex financial instruments like capital controls. This project explores whether, and how, citizens form preferences around restricting foreign financial access. Specifically, it investigates the psychological roots of identity-based heuristics that shape support for capital protectionism. Drawing on experimental evidence, I identify three core mechanisms—a desire for national autonomy, ingroup–outgroup bias, and reciprocity-based fairness concerns—that help explain how individuals make selective judgments about which foreign actors should be allowed or excluded from domestic financial markets. This study aims to show that even in the absence of technical knowledge, citizens evaluate global financial openness through symbolic and affective lenses, relying on intuitive cues about deservingness, threat, and group belonging.

Do electoral outcomes influence public support for the winning candidate’s policy agenda? While voters are often assumed to evaluate candidates based on policy alignment, research suggests that partisan identity frequently overrides rational assessment. However, the extent to which the identity of the electoral winner legitimizes policy positions – particularly in the field of foreign policy – remains underexplored. This article leverages the 2024 U.S. presidential election as a natural experiment, using a pre-registered two-wave panel survey to assess whether electoral victory influences public perceptions of the winning candidate’s platform. Results reveal a moderate ‘winner effect’: Democratic voters exhibited an increase in support for Trump’s foreign policy positions post-election, while support for Harris declined, even among her base. Nevertheless, winner effects produced shifts in foreign policy preferences commensurate with those on a highly salient domestic issue, challenging assumptions about greater volatility in foreign policy. Furthermore, pre-election candidate support conditioned post-election stability, with winning-party supporters maintaining greater consistency. While electoral victories enhance the perceived legitimacy of the winner’s platform, partisan identity remains the primary constraint, limiting large-scale ideological realignment.

A growing literature documents how national governments can try to shift blame to International Organizations (IO). These studies focus almost entirely on top-down governments’ attempts to shift blame for policy failure and how it is reflected in the media, parliamentary debates or other government communication. In these accounts, citizens are passive – responding to politicians’ messages. We are missing the bottom-up analysis. Can citizens do their own blame shifting for policy failure from national governments to IOs? Methodologically, the reliance on observational data in existing studies makes it impossible to separate the bottom-up process from the top-down one, and to causally trace the shift in blame to policy failure. This paper begins to fill this gap. We argue that even without having populist/Eurosceptic attitudes (another focus of current literature), and even without blame avoidance action by political leaders and parties, members of the wider public can use information on who is responsible for a policy in order to attribute and shift blame for policy failure. As an unlikely case, we study the European Banking Union (EBU), in which member states delegated banking supervision to a supranational agency. We test our arguments using a conjoint survey experiment with 1,724 participants in Germany, which is a least-likely country. We find that a taxpayer-funded bank rescue costs governments 20 percent of the public’s support, but this is mitigated by 14 percent if the EU is involved in bank supervision. This effect is stronger for Eurosceptic citizens, but not restricted to them.

Do people blame their government for adverse banking conditions, such as limited access to credit and unfavorable service terms? Will they also hold it accountable for such events outside periods of economic downturn? In the face of extensive research focusing on economic and banking crises as encompassing mechanisms of economic voting and protest, we argue that people’s daily experiences with banks provide them with tools and opportunities to recognize adverse banking outputs also in routine times, and to attribute responsibility for that to the government. We implement two studies to support this argument. Study one is a conjoint survey experiment conducted in Germany (a less likely country for blaming the government for bank failures). It is aimed at uncovering the causal effect that adverse banking conditions—both bad personal experiences and tax-funded bank bailouts—have on people’s preferences in choosing incumbents in elections. The design enables separating these effects from those of individual- and national-level economic distress. Study two is a large-scale comparative analysis of observational data from more than 100 democracies over 32 years. We proxy for low access to bank credit and poor bank service using data on bank losses, which also occur outside of crisis periods. We show how it significantly decreases electoral support for incumbents and increases participation in anti-government protests. We also provide evidence that bank losses are a suitable proxy—people are aware of them, they are not mere reflections of the business cycle, banking crisis, or other economic events, and they affect individuals more in countries in which the responsibility of the government is more easily detectable. Thus, our answer to both questions asked here is yes—people do blame their government for adverse, non-sensational banking conditions, and they do it especially outside periods of economic downturn. These conclusions, we believe, make an important contribution to both economic voting and banking politics literatures.

There is ample literature on drivers of electoral success of Eurosceptic parties, but less on the electoral rewards for their performance in office. Eurosceptic parties, typically populist but not necessarily radical right, operate within the European Union (EU)’s highly developed multi-level governance structure, which blunts their agenda more than other international organizations do. We lack a theory about how voters respond to the record of Eurosceptic governments. We argue that when European integration accelerates, support for Eurosceptic government parties falls even if support for Eurosceptic parties outside government increases, and that fiscal allocations from the EU counterintuitively further reduce support for incumbent Eurosceptic parties. We demonstrate our arguments using observational data on all parties and national elections in all of the EU member states from 1979 to 2018 and test our hypotheses with a conjoint survey experimental design.

Does exposure to conflict displacement amplify support for far-right parties? This study investigates the political consequences of conflict-induced displacement in northern Israel by exploiting a natural experiment arising from government-ordered evacuations during military conflicts. Using a pre-registered survey and a regression discontinuity design (RDD) based on an exogenous 5 km threshold, I assess changes in retrospective and prospective voting behavior as well as self-reported political ideology. The analysis reveals no evidence that displacement increases far-right support or induces partisan realignment. Rather, evacuees demonstrate a modest rightward shift in ideological self-placement without corresponding changes in voting behavior. This divergence suggests that displacement influences symbolic political positioning while preserving established partisan loyalties. These findings occur within a broader pattern of political frustration and disengagement—pointing to heightened disillusionment with the existing political establishment. These findings reveal troubling implications for democratic accountability during external conflict: leaders may be shielded from electoral consequences of security failures even as civic engagement deteriorates, challenging models of wartime accountability.

Could political rivalry in a setting of high affective polarization manifest in a willingness to curtail social rights from political opponents? This study explores whether political rivalry in a polarized era biases perceptions of welfare deservingness, typically guided by political ideology and the degree to which welfare recipients are motivated to seek employment. Using the Israeli 2023 judicial reform crisis as a case study, we conducted a pre-registered experiment, manipulating the motivation and implicit political affiliations of hypothetical welfare recipients. We find that while motivated recipients are generally seen as more deserving, political biases significantly distort these evaluations. Out-group recipients are viewed as less deserving than in-group members. Additionally, absent political cues, motivation bears a higher reward for recipients as compared to both in- and out-group motivated recipients. The study reveals the societal risks of escalating political divisions, including the denial of social rights of political out-group members.

Under what conditions do threat perceptions erode political trust? While the antecedents of political trust and threat perception have both been widely studied, existing research offers competing arguments when combining the two. Drawing on intergroup threat theory and system justification theory, we examine how different types of threat perceptions affect political trust, and how this relationship is shaped by political ideology. We leverage the occurrence of two distinct conflicts in Israel—an internal political-judicial conflict in 2023 and an external conflict, the Israel-Hamas war of 2023–2025. Drawing on two cross-sectional surveys conducted during these events, we find that: (1) in the context of internal political crisis, distrust intensifies among left-leaning individuals, particularly those perceiving greater economic threats; and (2) in the context of external conflict, this ideological asymmetries largely recede. These findings show how threat type and conflict context jointly shape political trust, and how internal political crises may produce asymmetric patterns of distrust.

According to the literature, the IMF’s track-record in averting financial crises and promoting economic growth is mixed, and evidence suggests that IMF programs may increase poverty and income inequality, and have adverse and even gendered effects on unemployment, labour income and rights. IMF programs are also linked to deteriorating public health, educational outcomes, vaccination rates, child mortality, corruption, government instability and the likelihood of civil war. We replicate results from 508 models in 29 related articles in top journals (all such articles for which we could obtain replication files), and find that many of them effectively base their conclusions on a small set of countries or years, even when their nominal samples are large. To calculate this we develop indicators of the size of effective samples, which tell us if a particular estimate is based on the entire data fed into the regression, or rather on an effectively narrower subset of observations. A small effective sample hinders the ability to generalize the results to the entire nominal sample (low internal validity), and possibly also to a target population (low external validity) especially if the sample is representative of the population. These indicators, which are comparable across models and datasets, can be applied to a range of regression analyses and methods. We use these indicators to also demonstrate how scholars trade-off meticulousness (in both treatment operationalization and in causal identification) against generalizability. Our indicators can help scholars manage and optimize this trade-off.