Klaudia Wegschaider

🔍 Many migration policies involve conflicting yet equally important moral goals.

These aren't just philosophical puzzles, they're real tensions that shape decisions.

Here's how engagement w/ ethical dilemmas can improve debates and policymaking on migration➡️ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Thanks… not using this, so it’s probably still my laptop 😅

Looking for recommendations! 📚📖 🙏🏻

Starting in October, I will be teaching a seminar on democratic resilience. Suggestions for readings, incl. your own work, are welcome!

I will make the syllabus publicly available.

Post-script 1: I’d be remiss not to mention we encountered some appallingly misinformed comments about qualitative methods during this paper’s journey to publication. I hope more individuals learn about qualitative methods—not necessarily to use them, but at least to assess them thoughtfully. 8/9

Yes, this problem has also appeared recently for me. I thought it was just my laptop being weird.

Voting age to be lowered to 16 by next general election Other planned changes include expanding voter ID to include bank cards and moving to automatic registration.

Voting age for UK general elections to be lowered to 16. 👏

Hopefully this will strengthen the power of younger voters.

Also, getting people to vote when they are school age increases the probability of voting in their first election, which sets a “voting habit” early.
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Thank you!

Thank you, Vicente!

This is a great and very smart paper—like basically all of Klaudia's work. If you don't know it yet, make sure to check it out.

Thank you!

Thank you! 🙏🏻

Hands down, this is one of the very best papers I read during the last five years 👇. It is creative, out-of-the-box, mixed methods and relevant to several fields.

A joy you should enjoy!

Thank you 🙂🙏🏻

Thank you, Tarik!

Really great work with important implications far beyond referendum voting

thank you!

Thanks Leo! Now I finally managed to write my paper thread :)

Great to see in my weekly paper feed that @wegschaider.bsky.social's paper on the effects of simultaneous proposals in referendums has been published in CPS! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I am grateful to Christopher Wratil, Florian S. Schaffner, Alyssa Taylor, John Holbein, Noah Bacine, Giovanni Capoccia, Samuel Schmid, Lukas Stoetzer, Guillermo Kreiman, Raquel Chanto, Joanne Haddad, Moritz Marbach, Matias Lopez, Konstantinos Matakos, the anonymous reviewers, and the seminar participants at the University of Vienna, the European University Institute, the University of Oxford, Yale University, the EPSA Conference panel, the APSA Conference panel, the NCCR Graduate Conference panel, the EuroWEPS workshop, and the OX|BER workshop for their helpful feedback. This research would not have been possible without the generous funding by the Swiss nccr-on-the-move network, Pembroke College, the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, and the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford.

Many people have kindly provided feedback on this paper, so here’s my block of thanks.

The paper is out, but many questions remain. People sometimes ask me whether I recommend having more simultaneous proposals.

My answer: it depends on what the underlying mechanism is. So that’s what I am studying now. Work in progress—stay tuned.

I remembered prior work on the impact of reference points and wondered if those parties were getting their strategy wrong…

And that’s how this article came about.

But the start of this project was qualitative work. In the archives, I stumbled into party discussions on launching enfranchisement referendums.

Often, pro-enfranchisement parties seemed convinced that two simultaneous proposals would hurt their cause.

Empirically, I draw on a pre-registered survey experiment in the United States and observational data from Swiss cantonal referendums.

I find that support for the moderate proposal indeed is higher when paired with the extreme version.

Scope conditions:

(a) it must be easily possible to map both proposals on a single policy dimension,
(b) all proposals must be located on the same side relative to the status quo, and
(c) it must be apparent to the voter which of the two is the more moderate version of change.

Argument:

Simultaneous proposals increase the share of voters willing to support the more moderate proposal, as compared to when that same proposal is on the ballot without a more extreme version (whereby moderate and extreme are defined relative to one another).

An example would be asking

1️⃣ Do you support local voting rights for immigrants who have lived here for one year?

simultaneously with

2️⃣ Do you support local voting rights for immigrants who have lived here for eight years?

The Effect of Simultaneous Proposals: The Case of Immigrant Enfranchisement - Klaudia Wegschaider, 2025 Is voting behaviour in referendums impacted by having similar proposals on the same topic? Drawing on the literature on the compromise effect, I argue that supp...

In this article, I study the effect of one type of multi-option format—having simultaneous, binary proposals on the same topic.

This format entails two (or more) questions that are separately answered with yes or no.

Link: doi.org/10.1177/0010...

Abstract: Is voting behaviour in referendums impacted by having similar proposals on the same topic? Drawing on the literature on the compromise effect, I argue that support for a proposal is higher if it is presented alongside a more extreme version. Empirically, I apply this argument to the substantive topic of electoral rights for immigrants—a contemporary frontier of democratisation. First, I test the argument with an original survey experiment fielded in the United States. Second, I delve into the practical relevance of the topic by focusing on Swiss immigrant enfranchisement referendums. Two case studies complement a subsequent analysis of voting data. The results of the experiment and the observational analysis both support the idea that the compromise effect shapes voting behaviour in simultaneous referendums. These findings call on scholars to consider the compromise effect in the study of popular votes and political decision-making more generally.

📝🧵 New Publication ✨

My paper on multi-option referendums is now available open access in @cpsjournal.bsky.social

If you are interested in referendum design and/or immigrant enfranchisement and/or multi-method work, read on...

Citizenship studies folks! I was recently asked, for purposes of a thing I’m editing, to make sure that I engage with the work on citizenship from the field of “international relations theory”. Are their standard works in IR that discuss citizenship? #migcitsky #poltheory

Around the world, a growing number of people are subjected to criminal measures for helping irregular migrants, including those who are seeking asylum.

This is such an important, open-source platform by @mayblin.bsky.social to track similar cases of criminalisation of migrant solidarity.