Mirko Wegemann

@mwegemann.bsky.social

925 Followers 243 Following

polsci | Postdoc at University of Münster, previously PhD candidate at European University Institute | radical right, justifications, gender | computational text analyses | he/him

Abstract: How Good Ancestors Make Good Citizens: Norm Legacies and the Activation of Pro-Social Behavior" Why do dormant norms resurface, and can they be deliberately reactivated to promote pro-social behavior today? Social norm research treats compliance as a present-day phenomenon: individuals infer expectations from contemporaries, with models of norm change assuming norms to travel across time through repeated within-cohort observation. Research on collective memory, by contrast, highlights the historical experiences of predecessors, focusing primarily on how traumatic events and the emotional legacies of victimization can increase engagement, but also often intensify intergroup hostility. Neither account fully explains the recovery of positive historical in-group practices, long after they faded. We introduce the concept of norm legacies: historically rooted in-group practices whose salience for present behavior is activated by appeals to a cross-generational reference group. We theorize collective pride and cognitive consistency as mechanisms through which such appeals can shape behavior today, and test the argument in a sequential design centered on SERO, the GDR's voluntary recycling system (1981--1990). We combine archival reconstruction and interviews with a preregistered field experiment in East Germany, contrasting a norm-legacy framing with an equivalent historical account of recycling. We further field two survey experiments in Germany and the US to isolate mechanisms and assess generalizability across varying identities (regional and religious) and domains (environment and economic). We expect the activation of norm-legacies to increase targeted attitudes and behaviors among in-group members relative to appeals that provide historical information or invoke present-day in-group norms without making the group's cross-generational benchmark salient.
Abstract: "What Citizens Mean By Democracy: Evidence from Open- and Closed-Ended Survey Responses" Why do citizens report high support for democracy in standard survey questions even as democratic backsliding advances in many countries? We address this puzzle by comparing two ways of measuring democratic orientations: an open-ended question asking respondents to define democracy in their own words and closed-ended items asking whether they endorse specific democratic principles. Drawing on more than 25,000 survey responses from representative samples in 14 countries, we use a fine-tuned language model to classify open-ended answers into substantive dimensions. First, across countries, citizens most often define democracy in terms of individual and civil rights, while multidimensional conceptions are rare. Second, open- and closed-ended measures diverge systematically. Center-right voters invoke liberal-democratic language at rates similar to the center-left, yet they are less supportive of minority rights and electoral norms when prompted. Far-right voters stand out more clearly in open-ended responses, where majoritarian conceptions are more prevalent than among other electorates.