Steven Denney

My pleasure!

Yesterday, we held the 1st Annual Leiden University Workshop on Immigration & Democracy.

A full day of discussion on new research covering migration, identity, and democratic attitudes. Excellent presentations and constructive feedback across all panels.

📢Early view

What do welfare preferences in #DividedSocieties teach us about #NationalIdentity ❓

Peter Ward & @stevendenney86.bsky.social find that candidates orginally from Eastern Germany or North Korea are less preferred by Western Germans and South Koreans 👇

doi.org/10.1093/pols...

Across both cases, welfare preferences reflect how citizens draw boundaries of national belonging. Even where ethnicity and citizenship are shared, social policy attitudes show they might not fully count as part of the nation.

In South Korea, exclusion of North Koreans remains strong across all subgroups considered.

Notably, this is not due to past or current “support fatigue”: we test for that (in both cases). The persistence instead reflects enduring national boundary-making.

In Germany, supplementary analysis shows an encouraging pattern: discrimination against Easterners is concentrated among those socialized before unification. Among younger Western Germans, the intra-national discrimination is abating.

Both Western Germans and South Koreans show intra-national welfare chauvinism: citizens from the other, divided region (Eastern Germany, North Korea) are less likely to be prioritized for state support.

We use comparative conjoint experiments to isolate the effects of origin on welfare preferences. Respondents evaluated paired job-support candidates whose traits (age, occupation, record, and region of origin) were randomly varied to isolate bias in selection.

We test this in Germany and South Korea, where division has created distinct internal “others”: Eastern Germans and those of North Korean origin. These cases let us examine how exclusion operates when ethnicity and citizenship are shared.

We ask whether welfare chauvinism, normally used to explain opposition to immigrants, also extends to co-ethnic nationals divided by history and politics. Might citizens discriminate against their “own” in welfare allocation?

Welfare chauvinism in divided societies: the role of national identity in social policy preferences Abstract. What drives discriminatory welfare preferences against co-ethnics and intra-national groups in societies shaped by historical division? This arti

New in Policy & Society (OA): “Welfare Chauvinism in Divided Societies: The Role of National Identity in Social Policy Preferences”, with @rpcward89. academic.oup.com/policyandsoc...

What can we learn about national identity through welfare preferences in divided societies?

More than a third of Lucid (now Cint) respondents in 2019 were "professional" respondents according to a new article in @polanalysis.bsky.social , and that's the conservative estimate

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

35 years ago, on October 3, 1990, Germany was reunified. Just two months later, voters in the former GDR went to the polls in the first free federal election since the Weimar era. Despite decades of socialist dictatorship, East German voting behavior displayed marked regional differences. Thread🧵

🚨 New paper in @thejop.bsky.social

Why do politicians often misperceive what citizens' policy positions are?

@simonotjes.bsky.social and I study ~10,000 estimates of public opinion by politicians in Denmark & the Netherlands to uncover the sources of these (mis)perceptions

Thread 🧵1/10

Now on FirstView!

This study examines how Japan’s graying influences immigration attitudes–offering insight the country’s unique stance on immigration and the political future of aging Western democracies.

#polisky #immigration #academisky

doi.org/10.1017/S104...

This is a really cool paper on the socialisation effects of studying at University. Surprisingly, the effects (moving in a leftward, liberal direction) are biggest for STEM students and those who move away from home to study, attend a single campus uni, and who live in ‘university towns’ and London.

🚨 New working paper! 🚨
@grattonecon.bsky.social and I just completed the first draft of "The Rise and Fall of Technocratic Democracies". Excited to present it in Munich this week—thanks to Laura Seelkopf, Christoph Knill & others for hosting us! 🧵👇
▶️ Motivation
Many democracies have undergone a

This paper explores how democratization can reconstitute understandings of nationhood by empowering a new class of “storytelling elites”---those with the institutional and rhetorical resources to challenge the state’s narrative. In this critical juncture, storytelling elites may challenge (1) the bottom-line premise or (2) the sideline elements of the prevailing national narrative. Their narrative strategies, in turn, shape how the terms of the debates are redefined and structured under democracy. I develop this argument through a comparison of “One Korea” and “One China” narratives in postwar South Korea and Taiwan. Using interpretive process tracing of archival and other qualitative data, I find that democracy helped entrench “One Korea” narratives in South Korea but displace “One China” narratives in Taiwan, as new storytelling elites challenged dominant narratives of “oneness” to varying degrees. This resulted in increasingly divergent support for unification as a national objective, with enduring implications for peace.

I’m happy to share this paper in @cpsjournal.bsky.social on democracy and national narratives, with insights from South Korea and Taiwan. It is part of a special issue on postcolonial narratives with @paulschuler.bsky.social, @deandulay.bsky.social, + others.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

🤙

4. Lee inherits a mandate (or at least an implied demand) to bring stability but faces an uncertain policy and political environment. Deep challenges remain: intensifying elite and popular polarization, weakened institutional guardrails, and an increasingly fraught geopolitical situation.

3. The political landscape is increasingly polarized. The left is organizationally unified but struggles to articulate a forward-looking agenda; the right is fractured and reactive. Both camps are shaped more by opposition than by coherent policy visions at present.

2. Lee is not ideologically transformative; he’s strategic and clearly understands power dynamics. His positioning draws on some anti-elite populism and affective polarization to shore up support among progressive partisans.

1. Lee’s rise doesn’t signal progressive (or democratic) renewal. It highlights institutional asymmetry: the Democratic Party remains electorally disciplined, but leadership on both sides has become more personalized and less programmatically anchored, especially in the wake of Yoon's removal.

My comprehensive overview of Lee Jae-myung's return to power, focusing on domestic political considerations. Some key takeaways and additional considerations given Lee's victory. 👇

Bottom line: We're not seeing a rupture with the past. It’s a reordering of priorities based on longer-term trends. Pressure from domestic polarization and regional instability will further motivate a more pragmatic agenda. What form the new government's FP takes and whether it "succeeds" is TBD.

4. Engagement with Japan remains fraught, but even here, Lee signals selective cooperation. Historical memory still matters, but security coordination and economic resilience increasingly weigh in.

3. Alliance thinking has evolved. For today’s progressives, the U.S.-ROK alliance is a tool, not a constraint. Lee frames it as an asset for economic security and industrial policy, not an ideological yoke, although Trump is of course a wild card.

2. Traditional pillars of progressive statecraft --ethnonational engagement with the North, alliance ambivalence, and anti-Japan postures -- are less sturdy and are unlikely to anchor progressive foreign policy. North Korea is a risk to manage.

1. Lee Jae-myung’s win is not a return to the Sunshine era. Progressive foreign policy in Korea has undergone structural recalibration: security pragmatism and economic statecraft now define the new baseline.

The most comprehensive account yet of how South Korea’s progressive bloc has evolved in the foreign policy domain -- and what Lee Jae-myung’s election victory tells us about changes to its foreign policy tradition. A must-read. The key takeaways, as I see them. 👇