George Melios

Read the full paper here 👉 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

And see the coverage by @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social:t.co/N4kE3L0mXl

Interpretation:
Well-designed, work-neutral disability benefits do not reduce labor market participation.
The small positive effects under strict assessors likely reflect filtering out strategic claims, not large behavioral responses.

📊 Results:
•Expanding access (mental health) → no reduction in employment, if anything small positive effects
•Restricting access (minor physical disabilities) → no gains in employment
•Stricter assessors → small but significant ↑ in employment

Using UK panel data (2009–2019) & quasi-experimental variation from the DLA→PIP reform, we estimate employment effects for:
•Mental health conditions (gained eligibility)
•Minor physical disabilities (lost eligibility)
•Regions with stricter vs lenient assessors

PIP is unique. It covers the extra costs of disability but has no earnings tests & no work incapacity requirements. This design lets us isolate pure income effects without substitution distortions.

Most disability benefits combine income support + work restrictions. That makes it hard to know: do people work less because they can, or because policy forces them not to?

🚨 New working paper alert!
As part of our Horizon Europe BENEFITS project, @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social and I study whether disability benefits necessarily discourage work — using the UK’s Personal Independence Payment (PIP) reform as a natural experiment.
🧵

Available at www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Takeaway: politics matters in private life—but signaling openness can bridge divides. Surfacing “tolerance” on platforms might reduce partisan sorting

Gender splits: Men penalized “progressive” profiles; women rewarded them. Women also showed a stronger in‑party preference than men

Counter‑stereotypes: Conservatives were more open to out‑partisans who defied stereotypes (e.g., White/Traditional/Non‑veg Labour). Labour respondents tended to prefer stereotypical Tories—except they liked progressive Tories

But tolerance is even stronger. Profiles saying “open to match with anyone” gained +19.9 pp—the largest effect; similar in size to being attractive. It’s not just avoiding “No Tories/No Labour” profiles. Even among co‑partisans, people preferred tolerant over intolerant profiles

Headline: Co‑partisanship is powerful. Co‑partisan profiles were picked +18.2 pp more often than out‑partisans

We ran a visual conjoint with 3,000 UK daters (18–40). Profiles varied party (Labour/Tory), a clear “tolerance” cue, ideology, race, education, diet, height, and facial attractiveness—using real photos to mirror apps

🚨📢 New paper out in @psrm.bsky.social with Yara Sleiman & Paul Dolan: “Sleeping with the enemy: partisanship and tolerance in online dating”. How much do politics shape who we swipe?

Just out! ERNOP's practitioner summary of my paper with @gmelios.bsky.social, showing that 🇺🇸 Partisans reduce charitable giving by ~4.5 % when their own party is in power, as faith in government crowds out private help, whereas opposition to government motivates private giving.

tinyurl.com/ernop1

Weather to Protest: The Effect of Black Lives Matter Protests on the 2020 Presidential Election - Political Behavior Do mass mobilizations drive social change? This paper explores this question by studying how the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death influenced the 2020 U.S. presidential electi...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

An interesting collection of opinions @theguardian.com on whether and how the 2020 BLM protests change the world. Covers our work with @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social on @polbehavior.bsky.social. Link on the first comment

New paper out in @polbehavior.bsky.social. We focus on an important and timely question. Do protests matter? Do they drive social change? @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social summarises our work nicely in the following thread.

Great summary of our paper!

Very excited to be in Vienna yesterday for the kick-off meeting of our new Horizon Europe grant "MultiPod" on promoting political participation and creating the "Public Space for Citizen Deliberation" in Europe!

Check out our new publication. Excellently summarised by @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social

Thanks to @bkleinteeselink.bsky.social for the great collaboration on this project. Looking forward to continuing this line of research! #PoliticalScience #Polarization #AmericanPolitics

Why do these findings matter? A lack of trust in government when the "other side" is in power can hinder democratic functioning. It makes it harder for citizens to hold their own party accountable and can lead to efforts to undermine opposing governments. 🏛️

Why? Highly educated people show a stronger president-in-power effect, and they've increasingly shifted towards identifying as Democrats over time.

Citizen Erased: Contrary to popular belief, we found no evidence that this effect has grown faster among Republicans. If anything, it may have increased slightly more for Democrats in recent years.

Moreover, perceived ideological distance to the other side has increased:

Megalomania: The increase is driven by intensifying partisan identification:

Darkshines: Fast forward to 2021. The effect has increased by 2 to 4 times! When one’s party loses the presidency, partisans' trust in government plummets. When they win, it soars. The increase is illustrated by the red line below:

Bliss: Let's rewind to simpler times. In the 1970s, the "president-in-power effect" was relatively small. Although larger for Republicans, both sides had relatively high levels of trust in government, regardless of who held the White House.