What Makes Discrimination Racial? A Trait-Based Account Applied in the United States and Brazil
(with Andrew James Latham and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen)
Despite extensive empirical work on racial discrimination, we still lack a deeper understanding of what exactly makes discrimination racial. We introduce the concept of racial trait-based discrimination as a tool to think about when direct discrimination is racial and apply it to examine how three specific traits—ancestry, skin color, and class—independently and jointly underlie discrimination in the United States and Brazil. Using an innovative survey experiment among 15,000 respondents, we find that White Americans discriminate primarily on ancestry, Black Americans and Brazilians on skin color, whereas all discriminate on educational attainment. Further, among White Americans, much of the ancestry-based discrimination reflects that ancestry is used as a proxy for education. We illustrate how different theories of race lead to different interpretations of these results as evidence of racial trait-based discrimination and discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of this framework for the study of racial discrimination.
[Invited to revise and resubmit at the American Journal of Political Science]
Early-Life Barriers to Immigrants' Political Integration
(with Andreas Videbæk Jensen)
How do immigrants' early years influence their long-term political integration? We distinguish three potential barriers to integration that emerge in childhood: Young immigrants spend formative years in the country of origin, their parents lack experience with the receiving society, and they hold the status of immigrant by virtue of being born abroad. Using original data from more than 120,000 immigrants and descendants in Denmark, we identify how each of these early-life conditions affects turnout and citizenship acquisition later in life. Employing within-family sibling comparisons and a regression discontinuity design, we find that longer exposure to the origin country reduces voting and naturalization, that greater parental host-country experience increases both, and that simply having immigrant status, in itself, substantially lowers citizenship acquisition but not turnout. These findings suggest that immigrants' political integration is shaped by distinct early-life barriers pertaining to socialization and categorization with lasting consequences for democratic inclusion.
[Under review]
Candidate Education and Voting Preferences: How Voters Prefer Politicians Who Share Their Educational Background
(with Andreas Videbæk Jensen)
There is growing consensus that voters prefer higher-educated political candidates, and that this preference explains the under-representation of lower-educated politicians across parliaments. We argue, in contrast, that ingroup favoritism should lead voters to prefer candidates with a similar educational background, and that testing and causally unpacking such same-group preference require more subtle methodological designs. We fielded four large-scale survey experiments in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Germany where we i) presented respondents with ingroup candidates who share their educational background and ii) randomized information about candidates’ competence, warmth, and policy appeal to test causal mechanisms. We find that both higher- and lower-educated voters prefer same-group candidates, though the preference is weaker among lower-educated, and that the same-group preference is explained by inferences related to candidates' competence, warmth, and policy appeal. These findings demonstrate that in a European setting, the over-representation of higher-educated politicians is not driven by an electorate-wide preference.
[Under review]
Two Discrimination Distinctions
(with Andrew James Latham and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen)
It is common in social science to distinguish between taste-based and statistical discrimination. Taste-based discrimination occurs when a discriminator has a preference against discriminatees with a particular group identity, independently of whatever other traits the discriminator believes this group identity is correlated with. Statistical discrimination occurs when a discriminator relies on statistical inferences about people with the discriminatee’s group identity as an indicator of whether the discriminatee has some target property in question. We argue that this distinction is conflated with a different and, thus far ignored, distinction, i.e., substitute vs. non-substitute discrimination. Roughly, substitute discrimination occurs when a discriminator ceases to discriminate once they acquire more information about the discriminatee, whereas non-substitute discrimination takes place when the discriminator persists in discriminating independently of acquiring more information. Whereas the taste-based versus statistical discrimination distinction is drawn based on the nature of the motivating state of the discriminator, the substitute versus non-substitute discrimination distinction is drawn based on another dimension, i.e., the effect of changes in the information available to the discriminator. This meta-distinction between two distinctions between different kinds of discrimination is important, in part because it affects what we can infer from data indicating change or constancy in people’s discriminatory behaviour when supplied with additional information, in part because it deepens our understanding of the morality of discrimination. Most importantly in the latter respect, it alerts us to the possibility that our concern for non-discrimination is a concern for modally robust non-discrimination.
[Under review]
Early-Life Unemployment Experiences and Political Trust in Adulthood
(with Peter Thisted Dinesen, Francesco Colombo, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov)
Political trust is vital for democratic legitimacy, yet its origins remain debated. While prior research links trust to societal economic conditions, there is little evidence to suggest that personal economic hardship affects political trust. This paper argues that such experiences can matter, specifically when occurring during the formative years. Using registry-linked survey data from Denmark, we examine whether vicarious experiences with unemployment around the age of 16---through parents, school peers’ parents, and neighbors---predict political trust in adulthood. We find a substantial and significant negative relationship between political trust and early-life exposure to unemployment in all three social networks. These relationships remain robust to extensive controls for individual and contextual socioeconomic factors and appear largely non-overlapping, indicating that family, neighborhood, and peer environments each contribute uniquely to shaping trust. Our results suggest that, while adult experiences of economic hardship may have a limited impact, early-life experiences with economic adversity leave lasting imprints on political trust.
[Working paper] [Presented, among others, at EPSA 2024; APSA 2024; Aarhus University 2024; SPSA 2025; Boston University 2025]
Exposure to Ethnic Minorities in Adolescence and Outgroup Aversion in Adulthood
(with Peter Thisted Dinesen and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov)
Promoting contact between ethnic groups is a central strategy for reducing prejudice in an increasingly ethnically diverse Europe. Yet, rigorous evidence on the long-term effects of interethnic exposure---the antecedent of intergroup contact---remains scarce, likely due to the methodological challenges it involves. To study the relationship between minority-group exposure in adolescence and subsequent attitudes and behaviors towards these groups in adulthood, we surveyed more than 50,000 ethnic-majority adults in Denmark and linked their responses to administrative registries to measure their exposure to ethnic minorities in school around the age of 15. To estimate causal effects, we sampled and compared siblings from the same family who attended the same school but were exposed to ethnic minorities to different degrees because they were enrolled in different school cohorts. Preliminary results suggest that greater exposure to ethnic minorities in adolescence increases donations to a minority organization, reduces discrimination against minority political candidates, and promotes some types of pro-immigrant attitudes more than a decade later. The findings suggest that exposing adolescents to ethnic outgroup members in school can durably reduce intergroup hostility.
[Working paper] [Presented at UCL 2026 and APSA 2026]
A Diagnostic Tool for Disentangling Automatic and Deliberative Processing in Conjoint Experiments
(with Wilson Merrell and Lasse Laustsen)
Conjoint experiments are widely used to study political preferences and biases. Yet, the cognitive processes underlying conjoint choices remain unclear even though they have important theoretical implications. We develop a diagnostic tool that uses time pressure to distinguish relatively automatic from deliberative components of conjoint preferences. We apply this tool in a preregistered immigration conjoint in the UK, showing that discrimination against Muslim immigrants remain largely stable under increasing time pressure, consistent with relatively automatic processing, whereas penalties for lacking English proficiency, high education, or job experience weakened under time pressure indicating more deliberative processing. The provides evidence that attributes within the same conjoint can have distinct psychological foundations. We provide evidence that two attribute dimensions -- diagnosticity and speed -- can predict whether attributes operate under more automatic or deliberative processes and provide a cost-efficient way for scholars to assess these dimensions in their conjoint experiments to improve our theoretical understanding of what conjoint estimates capture.
[Working paper]
Improving Intergroup Relations at the Cost of Intrapersonal Well-Fare? A New Theory on What Intergroup Contact Is (Not) Good for
[Data collection complete; running analyses]
Reducing Prejudice through Leadership? A Field Experiment on Inclusive Leadership Training.
(with Mads Pieter van Luttervelt, Martin Bækgaard, and Christian Bøtcher Jacobsen)
[Field experiment is designed and will be executed in autumn 2026 and spring 2027]