Authoritarian Preferences

In the main experiment, participants read news articles (Part 1 of the experiment) and are subsequently matched to four groups with different compositions of members of majority and minority. We define minority as those individuals with a name most ethnic Germans would identify belonging to Muslims, namely but not exclusively, Turkish, Arabic, Persian or some names originating from the Balkans. We define majority as individuals with an ethnic German name. The four groups vary in their composition comprising 0, 1, 4, or 9 minority members out of 10 group members. The group members will have their first name displayed during the main experiment. See below for the construction of the reference sample.
Participants in the main experiment will distribute money between themselves and each of these groups separately (Part 2 of the experiment). They will subsequently state their preference for decision-making rules that determine the distribution of money (Part 3 of the experiment).
Our main treatment variation is the type of news articles participants read before they make distribution decisions. They will either read 10 neutral news items without person identifiers or 10 articles that constitute a power threat. Our main power threat treatment comprises news articles of success stories of minority members. Each of these articles provide information about one minority group member living in Germany who either set up a successful firm or made important societal contributions. In a second power threat treatment, we introduce ethnic German success stories. Articles are balanced with respect to gender with 5 female success stories and 5 male success stories. Neutral news articles are constructed on the basis of power threat articles. Here, individuals’ information is replaced with sectoral information or a focus on the innovation itself (if relevant).
Participants receive a fixed payoff for their participation. Their allocation decisions are incentivized as follows: At the end of the experiment, one participant and one allocation part is chosen per treatment for additional payment. Part 2 is chosen with 90 percent probability and Part 3 with 10 percent probability. With Part 2 being chosen, one of the groups is further with equal probability randomly chosen, and the participant’s allocation decision when facing that group determines his own additional payoff as well as the additional payoff of that group’s members. If Part 3 is chosen, the participant’s choices determine the decision-making rule that decides on the allocation of payoffs across the four groups. The participant here is making a decision behind the veil of ignorance, and thus, his or her payoff is equal to one randomly selected person out of the four groups.

2023-06-21

2025-04-30

The main outcome variables comprise the allocation decisions in Part 2 and Part 3.
In Part 2, the outcome variable is the amount of money allocated to individuals based on their minority or majority membership.
The main outcome variable from Part 3 is the points allocated to authoritarian decision-making rules, decision rules 2 and 3. Further outcome variables are the points allocated to groups and individuals per group membership in decision rules 2 and 3, respectively.
Primary outcome variables will further be separately analysed based on whether participants are from former West or East Germany.

Emotions, authoritarianism measures, attitudes towards migration and the measure of power threat we employ. We will aggregate the answers to these measures and conduct separate analyses on them.
Exploratory analysis: Prior authoritarianism measures and social dominance orientation.

The experiment consists of four parts.
Part 1 consists of reading 10 news articles.
In Part 2, participants are matched with four groups, and each group separately. They are provided the first names of group members in each group. When facing each group, they decide how to allocate 330 euro across themselves and group members.
In Part 3, participants are informed that the members of the reference sample made decisions under three different decision rules. For all decision rules, each member of the four groups made an allocation decision for members of the four groups –including herself– separately.
- Decision rule 1: majority rule
- Decision rule 2: one group rule
- Decision rule 3: one person rule
Next, participants are asked how much they prefer each of the three rules.
In Part 4, participants fill in
1. Discrete emotions questionnaire (Harmon-Jones, Bastian, and Harmon-Jones 2016),
2. Their demographics: their place of birth, gender, age, the state they live in, monthly net household income, marital status, number of children, where their parents are born, highest education level achieved, their employment status,
3. Political and religious identification: political position (left and right), the party they would vote for if elections were to be held this weekend, whether they voted in the last federal elections, religion
4. Power threat: how much they agree that powerful positions both politically or in leading firms should be occupied by different types of groups, and how much they think the government should take into account the ethnic or religious background on those living in Germany.
5. Authoritarianism measure questions based on Altemeyer (1998), Costello et al. (2020) and MacWilliams (2016).
6. Social dominance orientation, the short version based on Ho et al. (2015).
7. Support for immigration, support for redistribution, attitudes towards immigrants and beliefs about immigrants’ poverty and unemployment based on Alesina, Miano, and Stantcheva (2022).

The reference sample is constructed via a laboratory experiment.

Not available

Computer randomisation

Experimental session

No

First data collection: 400
Second data collection: 200 participants
Third data collection: 990 participants

1590

600 control (about 300 in West and East Germany each), 600 power threat-minority (about 300 in West and East Germany), and 390 power threat-majority from East Germany.

Based on GPower 3.1, in a linear regression with three predictors and a sample size of 400, with α=0.05, and power at 0.80, the minimum detectable effect size f2 is 0.019. Amendment for second data collection: Based on Stata 16, with a t-test comparing two means in the main predictors with α=0.05 and power=0.80, 200 new observations from East Germany allows us to detect the observed treatment difference in the main sample for points allocated to the dictator rule and combined points allocated to groups with 0 and 1 person with a migration background in the one-group rule. Amendment for third data collection: We have previously collected in control, 190, and 148 participants in West and East Germany, and in power threat-minority, 192, and 146, respectively. Based on the realised effect sizes in this data, increasing the sample size gives us at least 80 percent power with α=0.05 to detect the following difference-in-differences according to G*Power 3.1: 1) the change in the percentage of participants who support an authoritarian rule in power threat-minority in West and East Germany, 2) the change in the amount of money allocated to participants controlling for minority status in power threat-minority in West and East Germany, 3) the change in the amount of points allocated to participants in the dictator rule controlling for minority status in power threat-minority in West and East Germany. In a similar vein, the power threat-majority has at least 80 percent power to detect effects similar to power threat-minority. Alternatively, if it has no effect as we hypothesize, the difference between power threat-minority and power threat-majority within East Germany can be detected with 80 percent power.