RESEARCH
I have two main research streams. The first examines the structural determinants and electoral consequences of individuals' perceptions of the deservingness of welfare state beneficiaries, while the second analyzes the relationship between macro-social change and political behavior. Both share a focus on advanced industrial democracies. Please scroll down to see a description of my publications and ongoing projects.
PUBLICATIONS
Attewell, David, Eroll Kuhn, and Andreas Jozwiak (2024). "Backlash or Inclusion? The Political Effects of Co-Ethnic Immigration.” Forthcoming at Political Behavior.
Marks, Gary, David Attewell, Liesbet Hooghe, Jan Rovny, and Marco Steenbergen (2023). "The Social Bases of Political Parties: A New Measure and Survey." British Journal Of Political Science.
Attewell, David (2022). "Redistribution Attitudes and Vote Choice Across The Educational Divide." European Journal of Political Research.
Attewell, David (2021). "Deservingness Perceptions, Welfare State Support, and Vote Choice in Western Europe." West European Politics.
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SELECTED PROJECTSÂ INÂ PROGRESS
SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Project: "the Sources and Political Implications of Attitudes Towards Class Outgroups."
​One of the major puzzles in contemporary political economy is why traditional patterns of class voting have declined despite a surge in inequality across the developed world (Cavaillé and Trump 2015; Piketty 2020). One prominent explanation is that class identities have been weakened by social mobility, individualization, and the eclipse of class conflict by the rise of “culture war” issues such as immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender equality (Pakulski and Waters 1995; Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Best 2011; though see Stubager and Harrits 2022 for an opposing view). However, class narratives about the lazy poor, middle-class hipster cosmopolitans, or greedy rich continue to proliferate through the media, in political rhetoric, and in everyday life (Larsen and Dejgaard 2013; O’Grady 2022; Zollinger 2022). Attitudes towards class out-groups may thus be more accessible than a cohesive sense of class solidarity (e.g. Savage 2000; Piston 2018). This two year project combines cross-sectional, longitudinal, and social network data to trace the sources of attitudes towards class-outgroups, to analyze their relationship to class self-identification, and finally to test whether dissensus within classes in attitudes towards class out-groups helps to explain why some voters maintain traditional class loyalties while others defect to different parties.
"Educational Networks, Social Closure, and Cleavage Stabilization", with Delia Zollinger. Revise and Resubmit.
Debates about the nature of a deepening educational divide in politics tend to focus on education as an individual-level characteristic, whether as a marker of skill endowment, an experience instilling certain values, or the consequence of self-selection based on earlier socialization. We instead look at how education (in terms of level and field) relates to political outcomes as a feature of social networks. We take cleavage-theoretical perspectives on the educational divide one step further, by treating individuals not as atomistic entities, but as embedded in social structures. Using original surveys from Germany, the U.K., and Switzerland, we show that educational differences in political outcomes are diminished in the presence of countervailing networks. Looking at vote preference and indicators of social closure, this study suggests that segregated social networks contribute to stabilizing contemporary cleavage structures, even as the mass social and political organizations that shaped 20th century cleavage politics have declined.
"Workplace Authority, Autonomy, and the Politics of Deservingness."
One of the central conflicts in both welfare state politics and in the workplace revolves around the necessity and means of enforcing work ethic norms. Do people generally need to be forced to work (or work hard) via the threat of punishment? Or do most people want to work, and work well, out of an intrinsic sense of pride or social obligation? This paper theorizes that intuitions derived from people’s relation to authority in the workplace inform their attitudes and preferences with respect to the unemployed and the governance of unemployment benefits.
First, I analyze observational data from the 2016 European Social Survey (ESS) to examine this relationship. I find that having authority over others in the workplace is associated with more negative reciprocity beliefs – beliefs about the prevalence of free-riding and the need for punishment as a solution (Cavaillé 2023). I then leverage a vignette experiment embedded in the 2016 ESS to test whether workplace authority conditions preferences for benefit sanctions in the face of negative deservingness cues. I find evidence that those with workplace authority react more punitively to negative deservingness cues by increasing their support for harsh benefit sanctions.