publications

peer-reviewed journal articles

2025

1. 

   Ethnic Diversity and the Societal Response to the Arrival of the Covid-19 Pandemic

   Dominik Schraff, and Sven Hegewald

   European Political Science Review, 2025

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   Current research faces challenges in explaining how contextual factors account for variations in the rally effect in political trust during the COVID-19 pandemic. While systematic explanations of country-level differences are hard to establish by means of cross-sectional comparisons, we propose to compare subnational areas within a country to learn more about the role of contextual factors. In this research note, we argue that ethnic diversity is a crucial contextual factor that helps researchers understand differences in political trust at the onset of the pandemic. Specifically, we propose that the rally effect should be restricted to ethnically more homogeneous contexts. An analysis of geocoded household panel data from the Netherlands reveals a strong rally effect in ethnically homogenous areas, while political trust in ethnically diverse contexts appears not to respond to the pandemic. This suggests an entrenched geography of political trust, which is associated with ethnic divides and is even maintained under crisis.

2024

1. 

   Corruption and Trust in the European Parliament: Quasi‐Experimental Evidence From the Qatargate Scandal

   Sven Hegewald, and Dominik Schraff

   European Journal of Political Research, 2024

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   Citizens’ ability to hold corrupt politicians accountable is a key feature of democratic political systems. Particularly in the European Union (EU), such accountability mechanisms are often argued to malfunction due to the EU’s complicated and opaque institutional structure, which could compromise voters’ basic abilities to detect political malpractice in Brussels. Putting EU voters’ attentiveness to the test, we provide quasi-experimental evidence of the causal effect of a recent corruption scandal in the European Parliament. Leveraging an ‘Unexpected Event during Survey Design’ identification strategy in France and Germany, we document a sizeable negative effect of the so-called Qatargate scandal on public trust in the European Parliament. This provides causal evidence on the presence of attentiveness to EU politics within these electorates. Given the EU’s complex institutional structure, we derive two alternative implications from this finding.

2. 

   Locality As a Safe Haven: Place-Based Resentment and Political Trust in Local and National Institutions

   Sven Hegewald

   Journal of European Public Policy, 2024

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   Recently, an emerging body of research has diagnosed a ‘crisis of trust’ in rural and peripheral areas. Yet, the majority of these works overlook local institutions as a potential alternative source of governance. Relying on original, nationally representative survey data from nine European countries, this article suggests that local institutions act as a safe haven for individuals with high levels of place-based resentment. Substantially, for these individuals, political trust in the local level significantly exceeds political trust in the national level. This dynamic is largely driven by concerns over representation. The stronger citizens feel that their place is overheard, the more they trust local relative to national institutions. This nuances the narrative of the ‘crisis of trust’ in an important way. Rather than conceiving it as a crisis haunting the political system in general, it seems to be better understood as a crisis of the national level specifically.

3. 

   Who Rallies Around the Flag? Evidence From Panel Data During the Covid-19 Pandemic

   Sven Hegewald, and Dominik Schraff

   Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 2024

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   Recent studies on political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic diagnosed a rally-around-the-flag effect leading to exceptionally high levels of trust in politics. While this finding has been established over various country contexts, our understanding of the precise dynamics behind the rally effect remains limited. In this paper, we argue that socio-demographic characteristics, in particular age differences, as well as pre-existing trust levels moderate the extent of the rally effect. Using individual-level panel data from the Netherlands, covering the time before and during the first Covid-19 wave, we show that the rally effect is particularly pronounced among older individuals, while it is absent among the young. Furthermore, we find a catch-up effect among the more distrusting parts of the population, such as populist supporters and low-income earners, who seem to largely drive the rally effect during the initial stage of the pandemic. This shows that the extent of the rally effect is conditional on socio-demographic characteristics, pointing towards the role of group risks and pre-crisis trust differentials in shaping people’s response to an existential threat.

2023

1. 

   From Causes to Consequences: Investigating the Effects of Differentiated Integration on Citizens’ EU Support

   Ioannis Vergioglou, and Sven Hegewald

   European Union Politics, 2023

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   Research on differentiated integration has paid considerable attention to its causes. However, we know very little about its consequences. Using the synthetic control method and interactive factor models, this article investigates the effects of differentiated integration on citizens’ support for the EU. We find that in cases where member states are granted an opt-out or are allowed to integrate into a policy area they were previously excluded from, support increases. In contrast, support decreases when member states are not granted a requested opt-out or are excluded from a policy area they would like to join. These findings carry important implications for the EU’s legitimacy. While differentiated integration has the potential to enhance citizens’ legitimacy perceptions, it can also undermine them simultaneously.

2022

1. 

   Internationalisation and Study Success: Class Attendance and the Delicate Balance Between Collaborative Learning and Being Lost in Translation

   Patrick Bijsmans, Arjan H. Schakel, Asena Baykal, and Sven Hegewald

   European Journal of Higher Education, 2022

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   The internationalisation of Higher Education is broadly seen as a positive development. It is a process that is said to contribute to intercultural skills acquisition, which is deemed crucial in today’s globalised society. Yet, research has shown that the benefits of being confronted with other ideas and viewpoints can get lost in translation due to different languages and academic cultures. We set out to explore the impact of the international classroom on study success and argue that there might be an optimum level of internationalisation. Based on a dataset that includes more than 2822 GPA scores for 836 students from four first-year cohorts of an international Bachelor in European Studies, we find strong empirical evidence that students’ study success is lower when there are few (below 3) or many (above 6) different nationalities in the classroom. We find the strongest effects of internationalisation for students who regularly attend class (i.e. 80–90%). Hence, we present strong evidence that internationalisation has a both a negative and a positive impact on students’ study success but students will only experience these beneficial and detrimental effects of learning in an international environment when they attend class.