Comme dans notre numéro précédent, nous relevons dans une rubrique dédiée les contributions portant sur la pandémie de Covid-19 et ses conséquences. Il n’en reste pas moins de nombreuses contributions notables sur nos sujets habituels.
Afin de répondre nous aussi aux enjeux et sollicitations de la situation, nous avons anticipé le recrutement d’un nouvel assistant de recherche. Dylan Alezra nous rejoint donc dès ce mois-ci, nous lui souhaitons la bienvenue !
Observatoire
Recrutement
Nous avons le plaisir d’accueillir Dylan Alezra au poste d’assistant de recherche de l’Observatoire. Bienvenue à lui !
Covid-19
Beyond COVID-19
Aider à mieux comprendre les changements majeurs que connaissent les sociétés en raison de la pandémie de Covid-19, tel est l’objectif de Beyond Covid-19, une bibliothèque de référence de recherche en sciences humaines et sociales en accès ouvert créée dans le cadre du projet d’infrastructure européenne OPERAS, coordonné par OpenEdition et Huma-Num. Un appel à participation est ouvert aux chercheurs qui souhaitent contribuer à enrichir cette bibliothèque. La participation passe par la sélection de publications susceptibles d’éclairer la situation actuelle et par la rédaction de notes de lecture sur ces publications, à destination d’une large audience.
Attitudes Towards Covid-19 – A Comparative Study –
Mené par le CEVIPOF, ce projet mobilise les résultats d’enquêtes en lignes menées simultanément dans 18 pays. Le projet a déjà publié 9 notes de recherche.
« C’est toi qui t’occupes des enfants aujourd’hui ? »
Dans un entretien, Anne Boring présente les premiers résultats d’une enquête reproduisant les questions de l’European Values Survey sur un échantillon de ménages français durant le confinement. Les questions portent sur l’organisation du travail et le partage des tâches ménagères, qui ont été fortement affectés par le confinement. Les résultats détaillés sont accessibles sous la forme d’un rapport IPSOS.
Le confinement amplifie l’aspiration à ralentir son rythme de vie
Résumé : À partir d’un échantillonnage représentatif des messages postés sur Twitter et de deux enquêtes réalisées en population générale fin avril et début mai 2020, cette recherche montre que, malgré la violence du choc sanitaire, économique, social et politique induit par la pandémie liée au covid-19 et le confinement qui s’est ensuivi, le moral de la population ne semble pas profondément affecté à ce jour. Certes, une large partie de nos concitoyens montrent une lassitude, de la fatigue, une grande anxiété par rapport à la maladie et se préoccupent des conséquences socio-économiques du confinement. Mais beaucoup, par ailleurs, cherchent à tirer parti de cette situation inédite pour faire une pause, prendre du temps pour soi et ses proches. Le « temps suspendu » du confinement devenant ainsi un espace, une parenthèse, pour concrétiser une des aspirations montantes de la population : ralentir le rythme frénétique de nos vies contemporaines.
Régis Bigot, Mathieu Chateau, Sandra Hoibian, « Le confinement amplifie l’aspiration à ralentir son rythme de vie », Sourcing Crédoc, n°Sou2020-4766, mai 2020
Who is doing new research in the time of COVID-19? Not the female economists
The COVID-19 crisis has spurred a novel and fast-growing field in economic research. But women are not submitting new work at the same pace as their male counterparts. Using data from prominent repositories of working-paper publications in economics, this column suggests that the effects of lockdowns on the division of labour at home have been particularly detrimental to the research activity of women.
Noriko Amano-Patiño, Elisa Faraglia, Chryssi Giannitsarou, Zeina Hasna, “Who is doing new research in the time of COVID-19? Not the female economists”, VoxEU, 02 May 2020
Lu sur le Web
Wellbeing Impact Evaluations: call for evidence
Le What Works Wellbing britannique lance un appel pour rassembler toutes les études qui ont utilisé comme mesure d’évaluation une des quatre grandes questions sur le bien-être subjectif posées par l’ONS (satisfaction dans la vie, bonheur, sens, anxiété). Si vous connaissez une telle étude, merci de la signaler à l’adresse ci-dessous. Les études sur données britanniques sont les premières visées, mais il est également utile de signaler celles effectuées sur des questions comparables dans d’autres pays, qui seront incluses ultérieurement.
https://whatworkswellbeing.org/blog/wellbeing-impact-evaluations-call-for-evidence/
Sexual Harassment and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market
Abstract: This paper offers a comprehensive empirical analysis of sexual harassment in the Swedish labor market. First, we use nationally representative survey data linked with employer-employee data to describe rates of self-reported sexual harassment across occupations and workplaces. The risk of sexual harassment is clearly imbalanced across the sex segregated labor market. In gender-mixed and male-dominated occupations and workplaces, women have a higher risk than men, and men have a higher risk than women in female-dominated contexts. We use a hypothetical job-choice experiment with vignettes for sexual harassment to measure the disutility of sexual harassment risks. Both men and women have an equally high willingness to pay for avoiding workplaces where sexual harassment has occurred. But the willingness to pay is conditional on the sex of the fictional harassment victim. People reject workplaces where the victim is the same sex as themselves, but not where the victim is of the opposite sex. We return to the administrative data to study employer compensation for the disutility of sexual harassment risks. Within workplaces, a high risk is associated with lower, not higher wages. People who self-report sexual harassment also have higher job dissatisfaction, more quit intentions, and more actual quits. Both these patterns indicate a lack of full compensation. We conclude that sexual harassment should be conceptualized as gender discrimination in workplace amenities, and that this discrimination reinforces sex segregation and pay-inequalities in the labor market.
Folke, O and Rickne, J. 2020. “Sexual Harassment and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market”. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=14737
The brahmin left, the merchant right, and the bloc bourgeois
Changes in the structure of political divides in developed democracies have been the focus of many studies in political science as well as in political economy. Some of these contributions argue that a new educational divide related with the attitude towards globalisation has supplemented and even sometimes replaced the traditional left/right cleavage. Piketty (2018, 2019) for instance finds that the left has become the party of the high-skilled and considers the emergence of a multi-elite party system: financially rich elites vote for the right (merchant right), high-education elites vote for the left (brahmin left). Using ISSP data for 17 countries, this paper tests the influence of income and education inequalities on political leaning and a variety of policy preferences: the support for redistribution, for investment in public education, for globalisation and immigration. Results show that income levels are still relevant for the left-right divide, but the influence differs across education levels. Our findings also point to a certain convergence of opinion among the brahmin left and the merchant right, which could lead to a new political divide beyond the left and the right, uniting a new social bloc, the bloc bourgeois.
Amable, Bruno, Darcillon Thibault. “The brahmin left, the merchant right, and the bloc bourgeois”. 2020 https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:132236
Gender discrimination in politics: Evidence from a natural experiment in French local elections
While decades of research have investigated the reasons behind the underrepresentation of women in politics, uncovering discriminatory behaviours of voters remains a difficult task. This column examines the voting outcomes of French departmental elections in 2015, which required candidates to run in mixed-gender pairs, and isolates discriminatory behaviour of right-wing voters. Right-wing parties lost votes when the woman’s name appeared first on the ballot. However, the discriminatory effect disappears where information about the candidates is available on the ballot.
Jean Benoit Eymeoud, Paul Vertier, “Gender discrimination in politics: Evidence from a natural experiment in French local elections”, VoxEU, 22 May 2020
Unintended consequences of birth-right citizenship for immigrant girls
Granting birth-right citizenship to immigrant youth has the policy goal of increasing assimilation and welfare. But could it have unintended consequences if the parents value a more traditional outcome? This column uses a reform in Germany and survey data of school children to show that birth-right citizenship lowers life satisfaction and self-esteem for Muslim immigrant girls, but not boys. For these girls, it also results in family and career anxiety, reduced parental investments in schooling and language, less self-identification as German, and more social isolation.
Gordon Dahl, Christina Felfe, Paul Frijters, Helmut Rainer, “Unintended consequences of birth-right citizenship for immigrant girls”, VoxEU, 10 May 2020
Fact-checking reduces the propagation of false news in social networks
The most recent manifestations of populism owe a portion of their rise to social media and the unfettered spread of false and misleading narratives or, as they are sometimes called, ‘alternative facts’. This column makes use of an online experiment conducted among Facebook users in France during the 2019 European Parliament elections to show that fact-checking can staunch the flow of false information, as can the imposition of small costs such as requiring an additional click to confirm a user’s willingness to share news.
Emeric Henry, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Sergei Guriev, “Fact-checking reduces the propagation of false news in social networks”, 21 May 2020
Social deliberation systematically shifts resource allocation decisions by focusing on the fate of the least well-off
How much inequality should be tolerated? How should the poorest be treated? Though sometimes conflated, concerns about inequality and the fate of the poorest involve different allocation principles with different sociopolitical implications. We tested whether deliberation – the core of democracy – influences reasoning about distributive principles. 322 participants faced allocation decisions for others between egalitarian (low variance in allocation), utilitarian (high total amount), and maximin (maximizing the welfare of the poorest) options. After their initial decisions, participants either reflected upon similar decisions solely or discussed them in pairs before facing the same choices again individually. Social, but not solitary, deliberation led to more maximin and fewer egalitarian choices, and this change lasted at least 5 months after the experiment. Conversation analyses of approximately 7,500 utterances suggest that some participants initially made egalitarian choices heuristically, when in fact they mostly cared about the poorest, and dialogue promoted more internally coherent maximin preferences.
Ueshima, Atsushi, Hugo Mercier, and Tatsuya Kameda. 2020. “Social Deliberation Systematically Shifts Resource Allocation Decisions by Focusing on the Fate of the Least Well-off.” PsyArXiv. May 23. doi:10.31234/osf.io/n4vmb
The Relationship Between Online Vigilance and Affective Well-Being in Everyday Life: Combining Smartphone Logging with Experience Sampling
Through communication technology, users find themselves constantly connected to others to such an extent that they routinely develop a mindset of connectedness. This mindset has been defined as online vigilance. Although there is a large body of research on media use and well-being, the question of how online vigilance impacts well-being remains unanswered. In this preregistered study, we combine experience sampling and smartphone logging to address the relation of online vigilance and affective well-being in everyday life. Seventy-five Android users answered eight daily surveys over five days (N = 1615) whilst having their smartphone use logged. Thinking about smartphone-mediated social interactions (i.e., the salience dimension of online vigilance) was negatively related to affective well-being. However, it was far more important whether those thoughts were positive or negative. No other dimension of online vigilance was robustly related to affective well-being. Taken together, our results suggest that online vigilance does not pose a serious threat to affective well-being in everyday life.
Johannes, Niklas, Adrian Meier, Leonard Reinecke, Saara Ehlert, Dinda N. Setiawan, Nicole Walasek, Tobias Dienlin, et al. 2019. “The Relationship Between Online Vigilance and Affective Well-being in Everyday Life: Combining Smartphone Logging with Experience Sampling.” PsyArXiv. October 15. doi:10.1080/15213269.2020.1768122.