@article{BobzienKalleitner2020,
  author    = {Bobzien, Licia and Kalleitner, Fabian},
  title     = {Attitudes towards European financial solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic},
  series = {European societies},
  volume    = {23},
  journal   = {European societies},
  number    = {Sup. 1},
  publisher = {Routledge, Taylor \& Francis Group},
  address   = {Abingdon},
  issn      = {1461-6696},
  doi       = {10.1080/14616696.2020.1836669},
  pages     = {S791 -- S804},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic affects all European countries, the ways in which these countries are prepared for the health and subsequent economic crisis varies considerably. Financial solidarity within the European Union (EU) could mitigate some of these inequalities but depends upon the support of the citizens of individual member states for such policies. This paper studies attitudes of the Austrian population - a net-contributor to the European budget - towards financial solidarity using two waves of the Austrian Corona Panel Project collected in May and June 2020. We find that individuals (i) who are less likely to consider the Covid-19 pandemic as a national economic threat, (ii) who believe that Austria benefits from supporting other countries, and (iii) who prefer the crisis to be organized more centrally at EU-level show higher support for European financial solidarity. Using fixed effects models, we further show that perceiving economic threats and preferring central crisis management also explain attitude dynamics within individuals over time. We conclude that cost-benefit perceptions are important determinants for individual support of European financial solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{VerwiebeBobzienFritschetal.2023,
  author    = {Verwiebe, Roland and Bobzien, Licia and Fritsch, Nina-Sophie and Buder, Claudia},
  title     = {Social inequality and digitization in modern societies},
  series = {SocArXiv : open archive of the social sciences},
  journal   = {SocArXiv : open archive of the social sciences},
  publisher = {Center for Open Science},
  address   = {[Charlottesville, VA]},
  doi       = {10.31235/osf.io/k2zwh},
  pages     = {23},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {The digitization process has triggered a profound transformation of modern societies. It encompasses a broad spectrum of technical, social, political, cultural and economic developments related to the mass use of computer- and internet-based technologies. It is now becoming increasingly clear that digitization is also changing existing structures of social inequality and that new structures of digital inequality are emerging. This is shown by a growing number of recent individual studies. In this paper, we set ourselves the task of systematizing this new research within the framework of an empirically supported literature review. To do so, we use the PRISMA model for literature reviews and focus on three central dimensions of inequality - ethnicity, gender, and age - and their relevance within the discourse on digitization and inequality. The empirical basis consists of journal articles published between 2000 and 2020 and listed on the Web of Science, as well as an additional Google Scholar search, through which we attempt to include important monographs and contributions to edited volumes in our analyses. Our text corpus thus comprises a total of 281 articles. Empirically, our literature review shows that unequal access to digital resources largely reproduces existing structures of inequality; in some cases, studies report a reduction in social inequalities as a result of the digitization process.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{KalleitnerBobzien2023,
  author    = {Kalleitner, Fabian and Bobzien, Licia},
  title     = {Taxed fairly?},
  series = {European sociological review},
  volume    = {40},
  journal   = {European sociological review},
  number    = {3},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  address   = {Oxford},
  issn      = {0266-7215},
  doi       = {10.1093/esr/jcad060},
  pages     = {535 -- 548},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {Empirically, the poor are more likely to support increases in the level of tax progressivity than the rich. Such income-stratified tax preferences can result from differences in preferences of what should be taxed as argued by previous literature. However, it may also result from income-stratified perceptions of what is taxed. This paper argues that the rich perceive higher levels of tax progressivity than the poor and that tax perceptions affect individuals' support for progressive taxation. Using data from an Austrian survey experiment, we test this argument in three steps: First, in line with past research, we show that individuals' income positions are connected to individuals' tax preferences as a self-interest rationale would predict. However, second, we show that this variation is mainly driven by income-stratified tax perceptions. Third, randomly informing a subset of the sample about actual tax rates, we find that changing tax perceptions causally affects support for redistributive taxation among those who initially overestimated the level of tax progressivity. Our results indicate that tax perceptions are relevant for forming tax preferences and suggest that individuals are more polarized in their perceptions of who pays how much taxes than in their support for who should pay how much tax.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Bobzien2023,
  author    = {Bobzien, Licia},
  title     = {Income inequality and political trust},
  series = {Social indicators research},
  volume    = {169},
  journal   = {Social indicators research},
  number    = {1-2},
  publisher = {Springer Nature B.V.},
  address   = {Dordrecht},
  issn      = {0303-8300},
  doi       = {10.1007/s11205-023-03168-9},
  pages     = {505 -- 528},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {Political trust—in terms of trust in political institutions—is an important precondition for the functioning and stability of democracy. One widely studied determinant of political trust is income inequality. While the empirical finding that societies with lower levels of income inequality have higher levels of trust is well established, the exact ways in which income inequality affects political trust remain unclear. Past research has shown that individuals oftentimes have biased perceptions of inequality. Considering potentially biased inequality perceptions, I argue that individuals compare their perceptions of inequality to their preference for inequality. If they identify a gap between what they perceive and what they prefer (= fairness gap), they consider their attitudes towards inequality unrepresented. This, in turn, reduces trust in political institutions. Using three waves of the ESS and the ISSP in a cross-country perspective, I find that (1) perceiving a larger fairness gap is associated with lower levels of political trust; (2) the fairness gap mediates the link between actual inequality and political trust; and (3) disaggregating the fairness gap measure, political trust is more strongly linked to variation in inequality perceptions than to variation in inequality preferences. This indicates that inequality perceptions are an important factor shaping trust into political institutions.},
  language  = {en}
}