Motivation & Overview:

The effects of the climate crisis are thought to be extremely far-reaching, from declining economic growth and agricultural productivity to housing displacement and job loss. An important set of consequences are psychological, relating to how climate change can exacerbate anxiety and one’s sense of hopelessness about an uninhabitable future. These psychological impacts are heightened for members of vulnerable and marginalized groups, as well as for those in poor and underdeveloped places that struggle to address climate change.

In “Adolescent psychological health, temporal discounting, and climate distress under increased flood exposure in Bangladesh,” Liza Goldberg and her coauthors examine the psychological well-being of 15 to 18-year-olds in two Bangladeshi cities that have been differentially affected by floods. The authors conduct surveys and focus groups with adolescents in the low-flood-risk capital city of Dhaka and the high-flood-risk city of Barisal. They find that although adolescents in both cities fear the personal impacts of climate change, rates of anxiety and depression are significantly higher in Barisal. In addition, those with anxiety and depression exhibit greater temporal discounting, meaning that short-term consequences are favored over longer-term ones. Discounting is an important — if neglected — consequence because adolescents will emerge as household decision-makers who must plan to adapt to climate change. The article is notable in increasing our knowledge of how floods harm members of an already vulnerable population.

Case Selection and Hypotheses:

Bangladesh is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. This is due to its “deltaic” geography (i.e., its low, flat land, crossed by many rivers) and consequent flood exposure, extreme temperature and humidity, and poor air quality. Barisal — a city of over 500,000 that is roughly 115 kilometers from Dhaka — is highly vulnerable to flooding, as well as being poorer (relative to Dhaka) and limited in its “climate adaptation infrastructure.” Partly for these reasons, rates of migration from Barisal to Dhaka are the highest in Bangladesh. By contrast, Dhaka — the capital city of over 24 million — is less flood-exposed and is slightly wealthier. Respondents in Barisal and Dhaka reported around four floods and one flood per year, respectively.
 

Figure. Study site locations in Bangladesh. Study sites at Dhaka (A) and Barisal (B) are shown in red.
 

The authors hypothesize that Barisal’s greater flood exposure would be associated with more anxiety and depression among its adolescents, and that anxiety and depression would be associated with greater temporal discounting. (In other words, they do not expect that flood exposure would be directly associated with discounting.) In addition, the authors expect that these negative psychological effects would be especially pronounced among poor Bangladeshis, girls, and those with a greater awareness of the climate crisis.

Data and Findings:

The authors surveyed 1200 Bangladeshi adolescents in 24 schools immediately after the flood season, which usually runs from May to September. In addition, 16 focus groups were conducted with around 160 total participants. Adolescents in both cities expressed a high familiarity with climate change. However, and consistent with the authors’ expectations, those in Barisal expressed significantly higher levels of agreement with statements about climate distress. For example 97% of those in Barisal compared to just 68% in Dhaka agreed that “My family’s security will be threatened,” 93% in Barisal and 58% in Dhaka agreed that “The things I most value will be destroyed,” and 98% in Barisal and 67% in Dhaka agreed that “My feelings about climate change negatively affect my daily life.” 
 

Image

Table 3. Climate distress survey results disaggregated by region.
 

The focus groups corroborated this unequal sense of despair, especially concerning the future and one’s educational and career goals. In Barisal, a boy said, “We expect that we will have to continue withstanding this [flooding] for many years to come,” while a girl said, “I used to want to become a teacher myself, but now I believe I will need to get married immediately after school because my father keeps losing his job during the floods.” By contrast, and because flooding in Dhaka is so infrequent, adolescents did not expect climate change to meaningfully threaten their life trajectories.

In terms of anxiety and depression, 86% of those in Barisal reported anxiety symptoms, compared to 71% in Dhaka, while 98% in Barisal and 88% in Dhaka reported depressive symptoms. After adjusting for factors like sex, wealth, and climate change awareness, the odds of being anxious and depressed in Barisal were nearly twice as high and more than 3.5 times as high, respectively. Across both cities, females were more than 1.75 times as likely to experience anxiety. And the odds of being depressed were over 1.85 times as high for those with a greater awareness of climate change.

Girls in the Barisal focus groups revealed that flooding was linked to domestic violence. Fathers facing financial insecurity were reported to engage in violence against their mothers as a consequence of this stress. As one girl put it, “The floods keep getting worse and worse. So, I may experience even more violence than my mother does.” By contrast, few girls in Dhaka expressed worsening family dynamics, and none reported domestic violence owing to flooding. Adolescents in Dhaka believed that floods in their region were simply too fleeting to result in such abuse.

Finally, only 7% and 6% of adolescents in Barisal and Dhaka showed signs of temporal discounting. However, the odds of discounting were twice as high for those with anxiety and almost 2.5 times as high for those with depression. The authors find some evidence of discounting in the focus groups, but no meaningful differences across cities. This absence may be due to discounting behaviors emerging around adulthood, which is older than the adolescent study population. Taken together, the authors’ findings imply that mental health support will be essential for those affected by climate change — especially in impoverished areas — to help them manage stress and to improve their ability to plan for the future.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Motivation

Political parties have long reflected  dividing lines between groups in a society, often called political ‘cleavages’. Examples include workers vs. business owners, Protestants vs. Catholics, and urban vs. rural constituents. Civil society organizations (CSOs) — such as unions, churches, and chambers of commerce — have historically shaped the content and strength of these cleavages.

However, both CSOs and cleavages have changed in recent decades. For one, traditional cleavages have declined in importance, and new divides have emerged, such as between the so-called winners and losers of globalization or between those on one side or the other of the culture wars. In addition, formal CSOs have seen declining membership and reduced political influence, while informal groups and more episodic activism have grown. While CSOs and political parties used to have highly formalized relationships, they now tend to engage with each other more opportunistically and sometimes antagonistically. It seems clear that CSOs continue to influence political cleavages — both old and new — in the 21st century. But how exactly does this occur?

Contribution

In “Cleavage Theory Meets Civil Society,” Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki, Endre Borbáth, and Swen Hutter examine the varied historical and contemporary relationships between CSOs, cleavages, and political parties in Western Europe. The authors develop a general framework for understanding the relationship between CSOs and cleavage development, providing insights into how contemporary politics reflects long-term changes in the structure of civil society. 

The paper is set against social science research on cleavages, which can be divided into two broad streams. First, classical scholarship emphasized the importance of early 20th-century mass associations, such as unions, in shaping cleavages and party politics. By contrast, newer work, written against the backdrop of a changing CSO landscape, has viewed CSOs as largely irrelevant, arguing that opposition parties shape cleavages via direct interactions with voters. Neither body of previous work provides a compelling framework for understanding how contemporary CSOs — given their fragmentation, informationalization, and politicization -- matter for cleavages.

The authors also shed light on the phenomenon of polarization, which is a key part of democratic backsliding. Indeed, electorates are polarized around several cleavages — economic, religious, and cultural — that populist leaders have used to justify excluding their opponents from politics, portraying them as existential threats to a specific way of life.

Processes and Mechanisms

The authors suggest that cleavage development can be seen as the culmination of three processes, which CSOs may influence in key ways. The first is “group formation,” which concerns how individuals come to identify as workers, congregants, or otherwise. The second process is “political institutionalization,” which entails cleavages being embodied in party competition. The third is “political stabilization,” whereby cleavages are reinforced over time by parties.
 

Table 1. Role of civil society across stages of cleavage development.
 

To understand how CSOs might shape these three processes, the authors outline two mechanisms. The first is “linkage,” whereby CSOs communicate group demands and pressure political parties to represent them. Linkage is hypothesized to be more important during the latter processes of institutionalization and stabilization; it was historically important in group formation but less so today because of the aforementioned decline of formal CSOs.

The second mechanism is “social closure,” which concerns how group boundaries are solidified. CSOs are hypothesized to contribute to social closure by bringing group members together and organizing them around shared demands, increasing their sense of ingroup identification. This mechanism is important for group formation as well as  political stabilization.

CSOs still appear to facilitate linkage and social closure, albeit in different ways than in the early 20th century. For example, CSOs are less likely to have formal links to parties but continue to exert pressure by organizing around individual issues, candidates, and elections. Voters’ relationships to CSOs are also more varied, creating divisions within the electorate between highly-active individuals who have a strong sense of group identity and people who are less ‘anchored’ to the cleavage. The authors also hypothesize that some of these dynamics may produce asymmetric changes across the left and right, as the strength and tactics of CSOs vary.
 

Table 2. Implications of the changing structure of civil society.
 

Cross-National and Case Study Evidence

The authors then analyze cross-national data on political parties and voters in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. One data source concerns the extent to which political parties are tied to CSOs and whether they receive large-scale CSO donations. A second source looks at whether party supporters are active in CSOs. Preliminary findings point to important differences between old, class-based parties (especially Social Democrats) and newer parties, with the latter much less tied to CSOs. However, within the new party families, Green parties are more tightly linked to CSOs than far-right parties, but there also exists variation within far-right parties. These patterns demand a more fine-grained analysis of specific cases.
 

Image

Figure 2. Members of civil society organizations among the electorate of political parties in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Note: The figure is based on the Joint EVS/WVS 2017-2022 Dataset (2022). It uses the battery of membership in organizations and partisanship questions. In the WVS, partisanship is measured with ‘Which party would you vote for?’; in the EVS, with ‘Which political party appeals to you most?’ For this figure, the two items are treated as functional equivalents. The percentage of members is calculated from all respondents indicating sympathy towards the respective party.
 

Finally, the authors qualitatively analyze three distinct cases: one New Left party and both old and new far-right populist parties — the German Green Party, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Their analysis reveals key differences as regards the importance of CSOs in fostering linkage and social closure. CSOs played a key role in consolidating the Greens and SVP, whereas in the case of AfD, antipathy from German CSOs helped generate a more outsider identity.

The Greens emerged via linkages with left-libertarian social movements in the 1970s and 80s. This included groups supportive of environmental protection and feminism and opposed to nuclear proliferation. CSOs provided ideas and personnel, which helped build a sense of social closure among party supporters. This identity still persists in spite of the subsequent fragmentation of civil society.

By contrast, SVP emerged through connections to Swiss farmers' associations, rural economic networks, and local interest groups. SVP has been radicalizing since the 1990s, becoming one of Europe’s most successful far-right parties and aligning itself with Euroscepticism. SVP’s long history of rural and community penetration has helped strengthen social closure among its electorate.

Finally, AfD emerged in a more fragmented context, via its ties to right-wing protest networks. The party was a top-down vehicle that organized in response to what it saw as Germany’s mismanagement of the Eurozone crisis. AfD lacks dense connections to CSOs and has instead built informal and often volatile alliances with protesters. Many German CSOs — as well as German society more generally — explicitly oppose AfD, which has ironically helped AfD build an outsider identity because its supporters feel isolated and stigmatized.

The case studies vividly illustrate how varied CSO relationships shape cleavages and partisanship in three of the most important Western European parties.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Motivation & Summary

Social, political, and religious polarization has steadily grown in many longstanding democracies. Some elected representatives and voters have come to view their opponents as illegitimate participants in politics who pose an existential threat to the nation-state; this justifies ignoring or violating democratic norms and procedures to prevent them from gaining power. As polarization increases, voters may prefer to support authoritarian parties that are viewed as better expressing their group identities, as opposed to democratic parties seen as hostile to those identities.

Trust lies at the root of these processes: polarized individuals tend to believe that those who differ from them will not act from a place of goodwill and will lack the incentive to promote their interests. Revitalizing democracy would thus seem to require revitalizing trust. Yet one’s sense of trust is often shaped by factors that are difficult to change, such as childhood socialization. How, then, can trust be increased?

In “Financial market exposure increases generalized trust,” Saumitra Jha, Moses Shayo, and Chagai M. Weiss provide evidence from an experiment conducted among Israelis in 2015. The authors find that individuals who participated in the stock market were more likely to agree with the statement that “most people can be trusted.”

Their argument builds on the intuition that stock markets are fundamentally about trust: investors take a risk by placing their assets in the hands of unfamiliar people who nonetheless have an incentive to promote their interests. As these assets grow, participants ought to become more trusting, not only of financial markets but also of people more generally. Surprisingly, the authors find that even those whose assets did not grow became more trusting. Another surprise is that the increases in trust were higher for Israelis on the political left and right. In other words, polarized voters — those who especially struggle to trust others — exhibited greater increases in trust than centrists.

Prior Research

Social scientists have analyzed trust as both a cause and a consequence. Much of this research concerns the economy, as transactions, contracts, and negotiations all require the belief that other parties will honor their commitments. Higher levels of trust may be a cause of higher economic growth. Conversely, consumers tend to distrust firms that are subject to scandals, leading the corresponding value of those stocks to decrease.

Apart from the economy, trust is also a central aspect of ‘social capital,’ which consists of the resources gained from one’s social networks. Trust can also promote good governance by enabling collective action and by providing legitimacy to political institutions. And as Americans and others learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, trust is central to public health compliance.

Survey research has identified a persistent trust deficit; less than a quarter of respondents to the World Values Survey agree with the statement that “most people can be trusted.” This deficit has many root causes. At the personal and psychological level, one’s sense of trust likely develops in childhood. Meanwhile, people who have experienced trauma or discrimination are less likely to trust others. Whether or not two people are from the same country or the same ethnic or religious group also affects their sense of trust. Those whose ancestors were victims of the African slave trade centuries ago exhibit lower levels of trust today. People in economically unequal societies are also less likely to trust each other. All of this suggests that improving trust is very difficult, especially in polarized societies.
 

Image

Fig. 1. Generalized trust around the world. (a) Geographic Distribution of Generalized Trust. This figure reports cross-national patterns of generalized trust from the World Values Survey (Wave 7). For each country, we report the share of respondents who state that most people can be trusted. Since Israel is not included in the most recent wave of the World Value Survey, the figure shows generalized trust data from the 2004 World Value Survey.

The Experiment

Studying whether stock market participation affects trust is difficult because participation is itself correlated with pre-existing levels of trust, as well as with other relevant factors like gender or personality traits (such as excitability). The authors’ experimental methodology seeks to overcome this by randomly allocating a large number of participants (over 1300) into treatment and control groups. Prior to this allocation, the authors conducted a survey to establish participants’ baseline levels of trust.

Those in the treatment group participated in an additional survey that explained the study rules as well as how their asset values would be determined on the stock market, quizzing them on these topics afterwards. Participants were given either $50 or $100 (USD), which was between 64% and 128% of the average Israeli daily wage in 2015.

Stock market participants received weekly updates on the prices of their assigned assets, along with a description and valuation of their portfolio, when the markets closed at the end of each week. Individuals in the treatment group were given weekly opportunities to decide whether to buy up to 10% of their portfolio, sell up to 10% of it, or make no change. (If no decision was made, they lost the 10% that could have been traded.) Participants ultimately traded at high levels: around 70% did so at every opportunity, and 80% did so in six out of the seven weeks.

As stated above, participation increased the probability of expressing trust by around six percentage points. These effects were largest for polarized voters and for those whose stocks performed well; however, even those who suffered market losses exhibited increases in trust.
 

Image

The authors carefully show how trust can be not only a cause but a consequence of stock market participation. Their approach is not paternalistic because it lets participants make independent financial decisions — as opposed to lecturing them — from which trusting attitudes then develop. In addition, the study can be replicated on a large scale because (a) it can be integrated within existing government cash aid programs and (b) participants would not need much special teaching or supervision. The authors’ approach should appeal to both those who seek solutions that promote equality and empowerment and to those who oppose top-down social programs but support market-driven solutions.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.